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"LADIES FROM HELL' 




Sergeant R. Douglas Pinkerton 



"LADIES FROM HELL" 



BY 



R. DOUGLAS PINKERTON 



ILLUSTRATED WITH 
PHOTOGRAPHS 




NEW YORK 

THE CENTURY CO. 

1918 



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Copyright, 1918, by 
The Century Co. 



FuUxihed, April, 1918 



APR -4 1918 



©CI.A492807 



TO 

THE GIRL WHO WAITED 

MY MOTHER 



FOEEWORD 

I realize the utter futility of writing a preface, 
for no one ever reads one — unless by chance they 
be in a hospital or waiting in a dentist's office. It 
is for these unfortunate few, then, that I indict the 
following. 

After you have been through the mill and mire 
of battle, your life is changed. It can never be the 
same again. It seems that you must still continue 
to fight, even though you be physically incapaci- 
tated. 

Therefore it is partially for my own amusement, 
and partially to continue my fight for ultimate vic- 
tory that I write this book. 

In it I have endeavored, in a meager way, to tell 
America what she wants to know. You are asking 
about the same questions as did England in 1914 
and 1915. You are in approximately the same 
position as was England in those early days. You 
are beginning to discover that business cannot be 
as usual, and that war is not all flag waving and 
hurrahing. You are learning, as did we ; and may 
a just God grant that your lesson be shorter by far 
than was ours. 



FOEEWORD 

My efforts will be devoted to a truthful presenta- 
tion of what I saw and what I know. There is 
little humor in warfare. That little I will try to 
preserve. My endeavor will be to loan you my 
eyes for a space that you may see what I saw, and 
thus know your war — for it is yours — just a wee 
bit better. 

I hope, as you turn the last page, that you will 
realize the true meaning of this struggle, that you 
will realize why I take pride in having been a mem- 
ber of the London Scottish, and that, above all else, 
you will realize the true duty of your America to- 
day. 

In closing let me express my appreciation to C. 
H. Handerson for his assistance in arranging the 
multitudinous incidents of my fighting days in 
some sort of sequence, and in helping me to weave 
them into a connected story of my little excursion 
with **The Ladies from Hell.'^ 

(Signed) R. D. Pinkeeton, 



Copy of Telegram to Colonel Malcolm from 

Field Marshal Sir John French, Commander-in-Chief 

of British Forces. 

I wish you and your splendid Regiment to accept my 
warmest congratulations and thanks for the fine work 
you did yesterday at Messines. You have given a glo- 
rious lead and example to all Territorial Troops who 
are going to fight in France. 



Copy of Letter to Colonel Malcolm from 
Major-General E. H. Allenby, G. 0. C. Cavahy Corps. 

Dear Colonel, 

I congratulate you on the accompanying message 
from the Commander-in-Chief, which you and your 
grand Regiment have so richly deserved. I wish to 
add my sincere thanks, and those of the Cavalry Corps, 
for the self-sacrificing support you gave in a great 
emergency. The behaviour of officers and men of the 
London Scottish was worthy of the best traditions of 
British Regular Troops. Only their steadiness and 
courage saved a situation that was as difficult and crit- 
ical to deal with as will ever occur. 

Yours sincerely and gratefully, 

(Signed) E. H. ALLENBY, 

Major-General. 



Copy of Letter to Colonel Malcolm from 

Brigadier-General C. £. Bingham, Commanding 4th 

Cavalry Brigade. 

My dear Colonel, 

I venture to ask you to convey to your Regiment my 
deepest gratitude and admiration for the work they 
performed on October 31st, and through the following 
night. No troops in the world could have carried out 
their orders better, and while deploring the losses you 
have incurred, I unhesitatingly affirm that the Allied 
Armies in France owe to the London Scottish a place of 
high honour amongst their heroes. 

(Signed) C. E. BINGHAM, 
Br.-Gen., 4 Cav. Bde. 
Nov. 1, 1914. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER ^^®5 

I How THE Call Came . 3 

II France 23 

III The Battle for Lille 60 

IV The Man in the Blue Jeans— A Trench 

Raid 84 

V Mr. Findley's Grave — Trench Life — 

Nichols Goes West 106 

VI Sniping— The Traitor at Bethune— What 

Happened at Lille 130 

VII The Farm-House between the Lines — 
*'Send Us More Ammunition" — The Spy 
AT Headquarters 1^2 

VIII The British Air Service Becomes 
Stronger — The Refugee from Lille — 
We Find our Wounded Sergeant . . 179 

IX Raiding a German Trench— A ** Seam- 
Squirrel" Returns to its Home— Back 
to Blighty and the Hospital . . . 190 

X Who Will Win the War— and How . . 228 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Sergeant R. Douglas Pinkerton . . . Frontispiece 



FACING 
PAGE 



The London Scottish entraining for the trenches . 20 

The Sergeant- Cook's Instruction Class . . ,. . 56' 

The London Scottish advance across a captured Ger- 
man trench 68 

After the day's work .......[.. 122 

Advancing in skirmish order against the enemy . . 154 

The London Scottish detaching a truck .... 174 

One of our guardian angels 212 



LADIES FROM HELL" 



^XADIES FROM HELL" 



CHAPTER I 

HOW THE CALL CAME 

FROM a hospital cot in Flanders the story 
came, from the tongue of a jawless, nameless 
man. I and a thousand like me read it, and read 
it again; then, along with the other thousand, I 
went down to the drill-hall to scrawl my name on 
the list of Great Britain's soldiers. 

It seemed awfully odd to be there, for only three 
months before I 'd teetered on the curb, not a block 
away, and seen our boys of the London Scottish 
marching off for their baptism at the front. 
They 'd swung along very spruce in kilt and khaki, 
and in the haze of August 4 the war seemed a long 
way off. 

As they passed, their pipers struck up that old 
favorite of mine, *^The Cock of the North," and I 
wished rather vaguely then that I might have been 
along with them. The crowd cheered in a hearty, 

3 



4 *' LADIES FROM HELL'' 

happy way, and I envied our boys, and I intended 
to join them — sometime. But I delayed, because, 
like the rest of us, I was asleep on August 4. 

Even the boys in khaki underestimated the task 
before them. They had marched away before, 
they 'd been cheered and wished godspeed before, 
and as old Johnny Nixon passed me he called out, 
*^ Hello, Pink, old boy, I '11 see you again at Christ- 
mas"; and I and the rest believed it. But that 
was August 4. 

So they marched away, gay and hilarious, al- 
most out for a summer stroll, and only Lord Kitch- 
ener knew or suspected the trial that was to come ; 
and he kept silent. 

To-day it was November 1, and of the thousand 
who had marched away only three months before, 
a scant three hundred remained. Johnny Nixon 
had gone down with the rest. 

Joffre's Frenchmen had swayed the German 
line back thirty miles, from Paris to the banks 
of the Marne, and trench warfare had begun. 
Slowly we folks back home began to stop joking 
about three-year enlistments as an impossible 
term ; the casualty lists were longer, and England 
was waking up. And then came the story of Hal- 
lowe'en night. The Scottish, our Scottish, whom 
we 'd seen go not three months before, had been 
in action. They 'd mobilized just outside of 



HOW THE CALL CAME 5 

Paris ; been rushed up in the pink of evening, in 
motor-lorries and afoot, to stop the onrushing 
Germans. 

Far off to their right they heard firing; like 
breakers on the shore it sounded, dull, tireless, 
meaningless. And then, as they drew nearer and 
nearer, the sounds took on distinctive meaning. 
Individual shell-bursts separated themselves from 
the vast jumble of noise, and then were lost in the 
ceaseless roar to the rear. 

It was half -past eight when they got there, and 
night was just coming down. They halted and 
stood at ease, while their colonel climbed up on a 
broken cart and addressed them. Then, with his 
good wishes and godspeed, they stumbled off to 
their trenches, mere threads on the face of the 
earth. 

On their left were the Lancers, on the right the 
Carabiniers, both regular regiments. Our Scot- 
tish were just volunteers — volunteers with orders 
to hold their ground. 

The night wore on till ten o'clock. Off in the 
distance they heard the Germans coming, flushed 
with their victories. They made no attempt to 
hide their approach, and *^Die Wacht am Rhein'' 
floated down to our men in the trenches. 

On they came ; one could almost see them now, 
but the British had orders to withhold their fire 



6 '* LADIES FEOM HELL'' 

until two hundred yards, and they held it. Wave 
on wave the German troops came on, and wave on 
wave they were mowed down ; but there is an end 
to physical endurance, and in time numbers will 
tell. The regular troops to the right and left fell 
back, and left the Scottish, our Scottish, alone, 
with the cream of the Prussian Guard at their 
front, on their right, and on their left. Perhaps 
if our boys had known their predicament this page 
would never have been written; but, being just 
volunteers, they had only their orders to go by, 
and they fought on and on. 

There were only a thousand of them, and three 
times they formed up their thinning ranks. On 
their third attempt the Prussians broke and fled, 
and our boys returned to their lines, leaving some 
five hundred and fifty behind in the mud and mire 
of old Flanders. 

But that isn't all the story. Back with them 
came a stranger, a German officer. A bit of a 
scratch on the head had knocked him out for a 
time, and our stretcher-bearers carried him in, 
along with our own wounded and dead. 

In those days (we have learned more since) we 
knew nothing of German Kultur. In those inno- 
cent, early days a wounded man was a wounded 
man, no matter what his creed or his color or his 
race. So our boys took the German and treated 



HOW THE CALL CAME 7 

him as one of their own, and turned him over to 
old Doc McNab for attention. 

It was only a wee bit of a scratch he had; bnt 
Doc leaned over him first, while our own wounded 
and dying lay waiting, and as he finished his work 
the officer asked for a drink from his bottle, which 
he had thrown down on the floor. 

Gad, we were innocent then ! They 'd not even 
bothered to remove the Hun's service revolver, 
which dangled from a strap at his side ; and, as old 
Doc McNab leaned over, the German's right arm 
twitched, there was a flash, and a tiny thud. The 
Teuton sprang to his feet, his revolver still 
grasped in his hand, but old Doc McNab lay still 
where he 'd fallen. 

That was the story that came from the hospital 
cot in Flanders. It was enough for me. I awoke. 
And when I got to the drill-hall there was no mis- 
taking the place, for from a block away you could 
see the crowd. A long, thin line of young fellows 
wound in and out of that crowd, each in the grip 
of that story of the night before. I took my place 
at. the end of the line and waited. 

Hours passed. 

In the meantime the line strung itself far out 
into the street, for from all over the country men 
had come swarming in. Tall, lanky Scots they 
were mostly, from up northward, crystallized into 



8 ^^ LADIES FEOM HELL'' 

a solid fighting mass by the story of the Marne and 
the tale of the London Scottish. 

In that line there was little talk, though the 
crowd hummed like a hive. We volunteers were 
silent. Here and there perhaps was a burst of 
laughter, but it was rare. Most of us were think- 
ing, and thinking hard. As the hours crept slowly 
by and I shifted from one tired foot to the other, 
the enthusiasm which had filled me at the start 
began slowly to ooze out and away. 

**Was it worth it?" I questioned. ** Belgium 
outraged, treaties broken, friends gone, and I was 
going; but was it worth it, after all?" 

And other men were debating, too. Dark 
scowls of self-analysis clouded many a face in that 
line, but not a man stepped out ; for the glorious 
example of the London Scottish, the thoughts of 
our friends, and the empty cheer that ** perhaps 
we wouldn't see action, anyway," combined to 
hold us in line. 

I might as well be frank. Four hours of wait- 
ing on a chill November day is likely to take the 
romance out of even war itself. But there was 
enough of romance there, just enough and no 
more, to hold me in that line from four until eight 
that night. 

At eight came my turn to be examined. A 
brusk and worn ofificer, dark and pouched under 



HOW THE CALL CAME 9 

the eyes, peered up at me in an impersonal sort of 
way fromi under his vizor. He took down such 
minor details as my name and address, and di- 
rected me to step into an anteroom, where I 
stripped, and then I was ushered into another 
room with two or three other chaps. 

Here we were hurriedly examined for physical 
defects, and a flush of primeval pride crept over 
me as they fled from my ears to my eyes and from 
my eyes to my feet without finding anything the 
matter. Long and tediously they lingered over 
my feet and knees and leg muscles. The wait be- 
came painful, so thorough was their work about 
these apparently unimportant parts of my anat- 
omy; but at last I was officially marked as 0. K. 
and fit for service. 

Little attention had been paid to my peculiar 
fitness, by either education or experience, for any 
particular branch of the service. These tired and 
hurried men in khaki seemed much more inter- 
ested in how soon I could report for active duty 
than in aught else concerning me. There was 
nothing about my examination that would lead the 
casual observer to think that Great Britain had 
spent time or forethought in selecting from this 
mob of men those specially skilled in this or that 
branch of industry. We were men, all of us, just 
men, and Great Britain wanted men, and in those 



10 ^^ LADIES FEOM HELL" 

dark days of 1914 many a man who could have 
served his country better at the bench or in the 
workshop was rushed trenchward and lost, with 
all his potential usefulness. 

Hastily I dressed and joined the silent group of 
some fifty or sixty other chaps who waited in an 
anteroom to the right. There we stood, staring 
morbidly at one another. There was nothing to 
be said; comradeship was banished by the solem- 
nity of the moment. Occasionally a time-worn 
joke would be passed among the groups, and the 
laughter was just a trifle forced and hollow. 
Some of us made brave attempts to hide our 
thoughts — thoughts of home and mother, fam- 
ily, and all that. What little talk there was 
was rough, inclined to braggadocio, punctu- 
ated by laughter that rang peculiarly out of 
place, like laughter in a doctor's office or in a 
morgue. 

Abruptly the door opened, and we were herded 
into a darkened room. At a table sat an officer in 
uniform rumpling through a mass of blue and 
yellow papers. Before him stood an ink-well and 
a Bible. A hooded light cast weird shadows over 
us, and we stood about, first on one foot, then on 
the other, and waited. For a time he worked fev- 
erishly, meanwhile grunting out hoarse, unintel- 
ligible orders to a pale and anemic-looking chap 



HOW THE CALL CAME 11 

who dashed in and out of the room like some 
automaton. 

Suddenly — so suddenly that most of us jumped 
— he stood up, and swung the Bible over his head 
with the habitual movement of a man practising 
his morning exercise. 

*^Eaise your right hands and repeat after me,'' 
said he. A forest of hands shot up, and we re- 
peated, word for word, the solemn oath of alleg- 
iance of the British Army. 

**I hereby swear by Almighty God that I will 
bear faithful and true allegiance to His Majesty 
King George V, his heirs and successors, and will 
obey as in duty bound commands of all officers set 
over me, so help me God. ' ' 

**Now kiss the Book," said he, and we kissed 
that dog-eared volume with various degrees of 
explosiveness and enthusiasm. 

I was now a soldier of the British Empire. I 
had been duly accepted and sworn, and, truth- 
fully, I was rather disappointed at the feeling. I 
looked no different, I felt no different, unless it 
was for a sense of duty done and suspense ended. 
I was rather dazed, but at a pointed hint from the 
recruiting officer I picked up my hat and departed 
for the quartermaster's stores. It was now ten 
o'clock at night, and the order was to appear the 
next morning at nine. 



12 ** LADIES FEOM HELL'' 

The details of our preliminary training in Lon- 
don would be of little interest to the average 
reader. It varied little from that now being given 
your boys at their respective camps. 

The short days of November and December flew 
by quickly enough, with marching and counter- 
marching, bayonet-fighting, and light field work, 
all intensely interesting at the time, but soon for- 
gotten in the new duties and new excitements that 
were thrust upon us. 

Gradually our flabby civilian muscles took on a 
more sturdy texture. The kinks crept out of our 
desk-bent backs, and our sallow civilian skins be- 
came bronzed with a rosy admixture of sheer 
health, while the seventy-five-pound service kit 
ceased to be a herculean burden of leaden weight. 

As we marched and fought our mimic wars, 
grim reports drifted back to us from the firing- 
line in France, sometimes mere haunting rumors, 
sometimes the sullen facts themselves; and our 
faces grew grimmer, our practice less mechanical 
and more intense. Something of the spirit that 
had dominated the London Scottish on Hallowe 'en 
came to us, and all sense of dread, conscious or 
unconscious, vanished. But the gulf between us 
and civilian London grew ever wider. We were 
nothing to them but a passing show, interesting, 
perhaps, as an incarnation of the fighting spirit 



HOW THE CALL CAME 13 

of England, with a certain charm as examples of 
the impetuosity of youth, nothing more. England 
slept, though the war was already in the fifth 
month of horrible reality. The people of the 
London streets, the happy, care-free, busy throngs, 
drifted on in a mist of unreality, while we lived, 
and lived intensely. Not that they could fairly 
be blamed, however. It was not their fault that 
they looked so resolutely the other way while Lou- 
vain and Rheims and Ypres were shattered and 
burned. We soldiers received news, some of it 
authentic, some sheer rumor. But no such news 
ever reached * * the man in the street. * * He was an 
outsider. 

The newspapers were hammering out ream on 
ream concerning the brutality toward Belgium. 
Dark hints occasionally burst forth, flickered on 
the popular tongue, and died. An uncompromis- 
ing, uneducated censorship kept the real facts 
darkly closeted, and though the newspapers knew 
much, their inky lips were shut, and the masses 
devoured miles of newsless news, while the facts 
crawled from lip to lip, and only empty rumor 
told the truth. When some fact, red from the 
firing-line, actually did slip from under the clumsy 
thumb of our early censorship, enlistments 
doubled and trebled and quadrupled instantly. 
A Zeppelin raid, fortunately, could not be stowed 



14 ''LADIES FROM HELL'' 

away in a musty cubbyhole, and hence did yeo- 
man's service for our recruiting officers. But 
while the civilian, fed on vague nothings for the 
most part, dreamed on peacefully, we soldiers in 
■the making, who received the real news from re- 
turning veterans, blazed in earnest fury to be done 
with our training, and over and at the enemy in 
fact. 

Late in December came orders to inoculate us 
for typhoid, and we rejoiced, for we knew that our 
days in London were now numbered. When the 
medical chaps appeared, we lined up dutifully and 
laughingly watched their advance. No more vil- 
lainous-looking array of venomous little needles 
had I ever seen before. 

Now, a typhoid inoculation is a simple thing. 
Like marriage, one never appreciates it at its true 
value until later. As fast as we were treated, we 
were given forty-eight hours' leave of absence, 
' * on our own, ' ' surely a silly precaution for such a 
tiny pin-prick! But the omnipresent brain of 
headquarters seldom errs in its directions, nor did 
it err this time, for I was scarcely half-way home 
when I was seized with a sudden and unaccount- 
able clammy coldness that traversed my spine in 
elephantine shudders. I chattered into the house, 
a picture of frozen misery. All afternoon I 
hugged the roaring fire in an agony of chills, all 



HOW THE CALL CAME 15 

night I shook and chattered gloomily to myself 
upon a bed piled high with blankets. Not till 
the wee small hours of morning did I cease to 
curse the idle jests that I had flung at the toy 
weapon of that grinning medical officer. 

Then came notice that we would start for our 
intensive and final training at Dorking, on Jan- 
uary 1. With this news came the Christmas holi- 
days, and some of us who were among the fortu- 
nate romped homeward, bursting with health. 

Not even all the spoiling I got at home, however, 
during those few days, and the real pang I felt at 
leaving, could dull my enthusiasm when I went 
back to join my regiment, bound for Dorking, the 
first step toward France. 

Dorking is, or rather was before our arrival, a 
little town of some five thousand inhabitants ; but 
by December its population had doubled, and sol- 
diery swarmed its streets by day and night. The 
town faded into the background like a frightened 
child, and the inevitable kilt brightened an other- 
wise colorless winter landscape. 

From six-thirty in the morning until five-thirty 
at night, and often until the gray of coming dawn, 
we drilled and drilled and played at fighting. 
Thousands of straw Teutons were annihilated 
daily. Our rifles, at first clumsy clubs in our 
hands, gradually became a part and parcel of us 



16 ** LADIES FROM HELL'' 

and of our daily lives; and happily so, for when 
you are plowing through the mud of no-man's 
land the only friend you have is your rifle. No 
single piece of training stood me in better stead 
than the incessant training at handling our Lee- 
Enfields. 

Our rifle-practice might destroy some of the 
cherished delusions of the arm-chair theorists. 
The ranges were usually from two hundred to six 
hundred yards. It is within that zone that the 
rifle-bullet does its sweetest work, and at two 
hundred yards, when a wild mob of howling Huns 
are belching down upon you, or you on them, the 
dainty rifle-sight is well-nigh forgotten. Its coy 
outlines are those of a stranger dimly seen and 
hardly recognized. You slap your rifle to your 
shoulder; no time for fancy beads and adjust- 
ments of wind-gage. It is just a case of shoot, 
shoot hard and fast, and may a kind Providence 
and a skilful doctor look after the poor man who 
fritters away his precious seconds in pretty loga- 
rithms. 

At the front, unless you 're sniping, the rifle- 
sight well-nigh loses its identity. Fine, hair-split- 
ting arguments about it are forgotten, and sheer 
instinct, guided by the rifle-barrel's blackened 
bulk, is enough, as the notches that might decorate 
any Tommy 's gun would indicate. 



HOW THE CALL CAME 17 

Don't misunderstand me. The rifle is no ap- 
prentice tool. It is not used to hammer nails or 
tacks. With all his apparent nonchalance and 
carelessness, your Tommy or your poilu (Fritz, 
too, I dare say) regards his rifle as his most cher- 
ished pet. He puts in hours a week upon its 
pretty mechanism, oiling, polishing, truing, always 
and everywhere; for the canny Tommy knows 
from cruel experience that the day may come when 
between him and the grim reaper with a German 
name stands only the shadow of his rifle. 

Winter settled down, and with its shortened 
days the pace became faster, the training harder, 
always harder. Eegular hours? We had none. 
It was just train, train, train, from field to rifle- 
range, from rifle-range to field again. Play it 
was, hard play, but news from across the channel 
spurred us on, and we yearned to be over helping, 
and avenging our brothers who had gone before. 

But the end was nearer than we knew. 

At 4:30 one morning (it was ghastly cold, 
with three or four inches of mica-like snow 
swirling underfoot and rasping into the bare 
flesh) we were routed out of our bunks to entrain 
for Epsom Downs. Like lightning the word ran 
down the line : we were to be reviewed by the Iron 
Man of the British Army, Lord Kitchener him- 
self. 



18 ''LADIES FROM HELL'' 

By 5:30 we were on our way, and in a short 
half-hour we tumbled out of our refrigerated 
coaches into the most blinding snow-storm of the 
year. Through it we trudged, each an animated 
snow-man, and then from six until eight-thirty 
that morning we awaited the arrival of the great 
Lord K. of K. 

But it was worth the wait. A splendid figure 
he was, big upstanding, a man's man from his 
boots, black against the snow, to the vizor of his 
immaculate cap, impervious alike to man's petty 
criticisms and God's storms. 

Chattering with cold, we marched by in stiff 
review, and then lined up before him and listened 
as his big voice boomed out above us, brief, terse, 
to the point, a message worth the hearing. 

' ' Men of the London Scottish, you have a record 
to uphold. Three things only would I leave with 
you to-day, you soldiers of the British Empire. 
First, fear God; second, honor your king; and 
third, respect the women." His voice caught, 
and he repeated with added emphasis, ''Respect 
the women. ' ' 

Then, with a brief nod of dismissal, he thanked 
and congratulated our colonel for the splendid 
appearance of his men, and disappeared into the 
blinding snows. 

No trains were waiting to bear us back. They 



HOW THE CALL CAME 19 

had long since gone about other and more im- 
portant business, and we were left to plow home- 
ward through fifteen miles of sodden sleet and 
slush. 

Then came the call ; one hundred and fifty of us 
were going to France immediately. Some kind 
fate smiled on me, and I was among the first of our 
battalion to be selected. There were brief, but 
hearty, congratulations from the unfortunates who 
remained behind, and we of the favored few were 
off for forty-eight hours' leave before entraining 
for Southampton. 

Forty-eight hours is a niggardly enough allow- 
ance for some occasions, but forty-eight hours 
before departing for the battle-front is an ever- 
lasting hell of torment. My first advice to any 
soldier in similar circumstances is to go to the 
theater, the tavern, go to any place but the place 
you want to go, home. I say this because I know 
what those last forty-eight hours cost my mother, 
though she showed the terrific strain but little. 

It was a Sunday night; I remember we had 
been to church together; my mother, my sisters 
and my little dog. Rags, walked to the sta- 
tion with me. I wished devoutly that they had 
stayed at home, and yet I valued every minute 
with them as my life, and blessed the long walk 
and the belated train. 



20 *^ LADIES FROM HELL" 

All about us were other men and other women, 
some talking excitedly, feverishly trying to cram 
into a moment the thoughts and hopes and prayers 
of a lifetime. Others stood silently, crowded 
close together, seeming to suck some modicum of 
comfort from their very nearness. Porters — 
there were porters then — brushed past with pro- 
fessional zeal ; trains shrieked and roared ; people 
came and went, bumped us, jostled us, but we felt 
them not a bit. We and those others about us 
were living in the past and the future, and all man- 
kind might have roared by and we would not have 
seen or felt their going. 

Even the little children seemed awed by the 
unaccustomed atmosphere about them. Women 
with babies in their arms held them up for a last 
fond caress of a khaki-clad father, not too proud 
to show a glistening eye. One chap — he sat next 
to me — ^was going back for the second time, and 
he leaned far out of the quaint old English coach 
to implant a last kiss upon the candy-covered 
lips of a pink little cherub. 

My mother watched and chatted until the final 
preliminary jerk told us that we were on our way. 
Then she waved gaily to me, and flung me a last 
brave kiss. I thought I saw her lips quiver for an 
instant, but she bent to pick up Rags, who was 
making frantic efforts to board the train, and 



HOW THE CALL CAME 21 

when she straightened again her eyes smiled, 
steady and brave, above his wriggling body. 

At London we entrained for Southampton amid 
the cheering strains of that ancient Scottish dirge, 
**Will Ye nae Come back again,'* truly an in- 
spiring note to waft after a bunch of trench-bound 
soldiers. At Southampton we were given the 
allegorical keys to the city and more freedom than 
was good for some of us. The group to which I 
attached myself made a valiant, but wholly vain, 
endeavor to consume the entire stock of some 
score or more ale-houses, and the results were not 
unusual. 

I must admit that I have only faint recollections 
of a rather rough and toilsome journey to the 
camp-grounds. There was a moment of awful 
concentration as I endeavored to gather my scat- 
tered wits sufficiently to pass muster as a soldier, 
sober and sedate. Then came an agony of fear 
as I realized that I had failed in my endeavor ; but 
a kindly provost marshal shut his experienced eye, 
and looked the other way, and the only punishment 
that awaited me was the usual morning of repent- 
ant thirst, and an awful fear of the effects of 
the channel-crossing upon my addled pate and 
stomach. 

At dusk, the following evening, we embarked 
for France, cheered on by half of Southampton. 



22 ^ ^LADIES FROM HELL'' 

The dock was as black as the Styx itself, but the 
ship was even blacker. There were the usual 
false starts and cries of late arrivals, the usual 
turmoil and bustle, and then, as the chimes struck 
out eight 'clock, the dock noises suddenly became 
dimmer, as if a multitude of gauze-like curtains 
had been let down between us and them. 

We were off. At the Southampton bar two 
powerful search-lights cut through the night and 
pinned us to the darkness. Through their rays 
flashed a torpedo-boat destroyer, a dashing black 
shadow smothered in spray. Semaphores wig- 
wagged up and down; a search-light wavered 
drunkenly. The tiny destroyer dashed to star- 
board and encircled us, round and round, like some 
joy-crazed fox-terrier pup. Our engines increased 
their steady thumping, and we were off — off for 
France ! 



\ 



CHAPTER II 

FRANCE 

CHOPPY channel seas, proverbial the world 
over, a reeling world underfoot, scudding 
clouds, bully beef, hardtack, and a night of well- 
earned, but unwisely spent, revelry, mixed with 
the same gladsome cordiality that distinguishes 
oil and water. From eight that evening until mid- 
night, I decorated an unsteady, but extremely 
popular, rail. But who shall say that even the 
darkest cloud has not its silver lining? Had it not 
been for that ill-timed mixture of tempest and 
toddy, midnight would not have brought with it 
a sight that will cling to me imtil my last reveille 
dies away. 

We were four hours out, fighting through solid 
sheets of salty spray, when away off to the east 
a dim glow welled up from the horizon. By in- 
distinguishable degrees it grew into a ball of 
yellow light, and a hospital ship rushed out from 
the mist, homeward bound, with its pathetic cargo. 

White as bleached linen she was, with a huge 
red cross of mercy painted on her side and illumi- 

23 



24 ^ ^LADIES FROM HELL'' 

nated to all tlie neighboring seas by a powerful 
search-light hung from her rail. Brilliantly 
lighted at her foremasthead was a tremendous 
Red Cross flag, held out stiff and taut by the 
nipping breeze. At the stem a Union Jack floated, 
and about her rail a band of alternate white and 
green lights set this ship apart, beyond all mis- 
taking, as a vessel that held nothing that she 
feared to show. 

As far as you can see her a hospital ship is a 
hospital ship and nothing else. Out of the night, 
like a torch, she springs, and into the night she 
speeds, bound for Blighty, for home. Such ships 
it is, these white messengers of mercy, plainly 
marked, that the Hun sinks '*by inadvertence. ' ' 
She passed, and we held on our course through the 
thick blackness of the night. 

Out of the morning mist came France, and down 
to the boat to meet us pushed a great somber- 
colored throng, of women mostly. There were a 
few men, old fellows, and a scattering of chatter- 
ing little children. 

Color? There was none; it was black every- 
where. Even in those early days France was a 
mourning nation. The Marne had cost. Mons 
had cost. They are four years past, and still, even 
to-day, France fights on. 

The France of the boulevardes and cafes is 



FRANCE 25 

not and never has been the real France, any more 
than the children of your comic supplements are 
the real children of America. The real France is 
a nation of impenetrable depth and strength, grim 
and everlasting. 

As we skipped off from the boat, the cheery 
faces of a few American women called to us. Be- 
fore them were great piles of rolls that tasted like 
home, and huge urns of steaming coffee belched 
forth untold gallons of renewed life to wave-worn 
Tommies. 

You can have no realization of how delicious 
a roll and a steaming cup of coffee can be until be- 
hind you is a night on the English Channel, and 
before you France and the fighting-line. 

Up into the railroad yards we moved, after a 
brief rest, and then war — the first intimation of 
it — jumped out at us. Gone were the English 
coaches, with their unappreciated comforts. Be- 
fore us was a string of very ordinary and very 
dingy box-cars, boldly labeled : 

Hommes 40 
Chevaux 20 

The above, which was translated by the more 
worldly-wise among us, referred to the ability of 
said cars to carry forty men or twenty horses. 
Personally, I am convinced that some one made a 



26 *^ LADIES FROM HELL'' 

grievous error in figuring the carrying capacity 
of these cars. I was one of the forty ^^hommes" 
in one of them, and the proverbial sardine must 
feel lonely in comparison to us. Twelve hours of 
jolting added nothing to our joy, although it served 
to shake us into a more perfect fit within the car. 
Never will I complain of the five o'clock rush on 
your street-cars. With all its horrors, it is a 
stroll in the park, compared with a twelve-hour 
massage in an antiquated perambulator, labeled 
by some practical joker, **Hommes 40, Chevaux 
20." 

Rouen, our destination, was a funny, squat little 
town, amusing in the extreme to us of London's 
busy thoroughfares. We whistled our way along 
its funny little cobbled streets just as church was 
letting out, for it was Sunday. Lined up on each 
side of us were rows of chattering French folk, 
three deep. Apparently the war was forgotten 
for the moment, and we in our kilts became the 
chief topic of discussion. Gay jests were thrown 
out at us, and were returned in kind, but the 
Frenchmen had the best of it. I remember one 
little gamin, with the shrill yelp of the street 
urchin, nearly wrecked the regiment by loudly 
calling attention in surprisingly good English to 
the marvelous shapeliness of our captain's legs. 

The enjoyment, however, was not all on the 



FRANCE 27 

side of the populace. We of the London Scottish, 
many of us bred among the rattle of trams and 
the roar of trains, found plenty that was novel 
in the curious old town. Its fifteenth century 
architecture, its thatched roofs, its jagged sky- 
line, and whitewashed walls reminded one 
strangely of the second act in one of Raymond 
Hitchcock's comic operas. I almost expected to 
see the inevitable brewer from Milwaukee rush 
in, escorted by two wax-mustached gendarmes and 
followed by a weeping soubrette and a crowd of 
irate villagers. There were plenty of soubrettes 
and villagers ; we lacked only the German brewer. 
He, and a hundred thousand like him, were forty 
miles away. 

Our camp, or base, was at the top of a hill over- 
looking the town. Long avenues, cobbled with 
unthinkably cobbly cobble-stones and lined with 
funereal-looking poplars, stretched away before 
us. Neat little houses, each with its flaming 
garden, broke up the wayside into homey patches 
of color. Over it all swam the dust from our 
pounding feet. 

At the base we were given a riotous welcome 
by the older soldiers, some of whom had already 
gone, to return slightly wounded, while others 
had yet to see the whitish, cotton-like plume of 
exploding shrapnel. 



28 ^'LADIES FROM HELL'' 

Friendships were struck up immediately; word 
from England was exchanged at par for word 
from the fighting-line. In time, facts gave way 
to rumor, rumor to gossip, and at last gossip 
itself resigned to the unceasing chaffing and 
friendly ** strafing" that is a sign of healthy, happy 
camp-life. 

The days were largely our own, and the mo- 
tion-picture theater and the canteen, with its 
delicacies, did a land-office business. Fifteen 
thousand of us boys were there. What little 
routine we had was similar to that of the training- 
camp back home, but there was a slight difference. 
The orders were sharper, the officers looked more 
tired and careworn. Everywhere there was an 
atmosphere of tension and strain, a waiting for 
the call that would start us flying trenchward. 

And one night, at 9:30, that call came. I 
and a dozen or so of my new-found pals were 
attending a moving-picture show. I remember 
that Charlie Chaplin had just completed some 
target practice with a large and succulent cream 
pie when the alarm rang out. We dashed out 
into the night without ceremony. At the alarm- 
post was our officer. The Germans were breaking 
through our lines. We were to be off immediately. 
We stumbled away through the dark to get our 
packs; and then the bugle sounded again, and it 



FRANCE 29 

was announced that we would move early in the 
morning. 

It was a real relief to know that after five or 
six months of training we were to be released 
from the leash and freed to do our bit. Like 
prize-fighters were we, in the pink of condition, 
eager for the gong and the test. Our bodies 
were rested, our spirits superabundant. Fear! 
There was none. There was no room for fear in 
the excitement of the moment, for to-morrow we 
were to become, in deadly earnest, members of 
Great Britain's fighting forces, and we longed for 
sun-up, as a school-boy longs for Christmas 
morning. 

Sun-up finally came, red, then yellow, and a 
glorious morning unrolled from the east as we 
marched away to the railroad station and the train 
that was to take us to the front. 

The scenery was no longer a novelty, but, in our 
intoxication, peculiar modes of dress, and odd col- 
loquialisms gained a renewed amusement for us, 
and were again held up to rude banter and ridicule. 
But the French laughed with us at our jokes or 
at our French ; for they had come to know Tommy, 
and they knew that his bark was a hundred times 
worse than his bite. 

The British Tommy, you know, is not a bad 
man at heart. He loves to chaff and chatter, and 



30 '^LADIES FROM HELL'' 

the French have come to love him, with all his 
faults, almost as well as they love their own poilus. 
There is something so solid and stolid about the 
British Tommy that it appeals by contrast to the 
Frenchman, used as he is to his volatile, excitable 
countrymen. It is the Tommy's stability, his 
solidity, that makes him valuable, especially when 
mixed with, and cooperating with, less-experienced 
troops. He steadies the line, gives steel-like 
tenacity to its backbone, and grim, unquenchable 
determination to its morale. But to see your 
British Tommy cavorting on the green of a rest 
billet or about a railway depot, you would never 
suspect him of those sterling qualities for which 
he is justly famous. 

While we waited for the train bedlam was let 
loose. French people were burlesqued, French 
trains were imitated, everything French came in 
for its share of ridicule, and the Frenchmen stood 
about us and grinned and enjoyed it with us. 
They knew better than did we that despite it all 
we loved France, and would love her still more 
as we gave more to her great cause. 

All day we waited for that train. Thanks to 
the Y. M. C. A., hot coffee and rolls were forth- 
coming, and, be it known, at a shamefully small 
sum. We of the wise, who had held council with 
veterans of similar uncertain trips, filled our 



FRANCE 31 

haversacks with chocolate, hard-boiled eggs, and 
bread, as f ortiJSLcation against possible vicissitudes 
of war-jtime travel, and we did well. 

Ultimately the dilatory train, such as it was, 
pulled in, amid jeers and cheers from the as- 
sembled soldiery. It was a decidedly dilapidated- 
looking little train, made up of ancient third-class 
coaches, loose-jointed box-cars, and first-class 
coaches, remodeled to suit the momentary need. 

Like a Sunday-school class out for a picnic we 
piled in. After an interminable argument, all 
were seated, and the officers repaired to the plat- 
form until a fitting moment of departure should be 
granted us by a crabbed looking train-despatcher. 
No sooner were the officers out of the door than a 
full third of the car left by the windows on the far 
side, to return, triumphantly bearing luxuriously 
upholstered seats from some empty and neighbor- 
ing first-class coaches. 

I suspect that future Baedekers will earnestly 
beseech American tourists to bring their own 
cushions when traveling in France, for I am quite 
sure that another year of war will totally denude 
French first-class coaches of such luxury. 

Evening drew on, and it was with difficulty that 
the rickety coaches bore up under the strain 
within; but, perhaps because he realized the im- 
pending danger to his train, the despatcher finally 



32 '^LADIES FROM HELL" 

let US loose, and we were off for the front, just 
as night closed down upon ns. 

Immediately the blinds must be drawn, for 
Teuton airmen have been known to spot such 
speeding trains and to bestow a bomb or two upon 
them, or perhaps a dose of machine-gun fire cast 
in at open windows. But we were not in total 
darkness ; no such luck. Above us, thrust through 
holes in the roof, were consumptive oil-lamps that 
served rather to emphasize the gloom than to dis- 
pel it. Nevertheless, these aspiring, but inade- 
quate, lamps were at premium, and one enter- 
prising Tommy, at the risk of his own life, crawled 
along the roof of the rocking train and pilfered 
the lifeht from our compartment that he might the 
better mend a slight tear in his equipment. 

But gradually the practical joking ceased for 
lack of further food to feed upon; conversation 
dwindled, and one by one we dropped off into 
the land of nod, surrounded by the fumes of 
the dilapidated oil-lamps and by a few wakeful 
souls whose voices droned away tirelessly through- 
out the night, telling and retelling little anecdotes 
of home life, of London, and speaking of their 
hopes and fears for the future. 

The night wore on amid the rattle and groans 
of the train, and those half-indistinguishable 
noises of the dark as it slipped by us. But with 



FRANCE 33 

the first faint rays of morning came another 
sound entirely new to us; and yet it was not a 
sound at all at first, but a feeling of omen, a sensa- 
tion of vibrations too low in degree to shake our 
tiny ear-drums. Gradually it became more and 
more pronounced, and all at once, as if a door 
had been opened, the clean, clear bark of an Eng- 
lish field-piece burst in upon us, punctuated by the 
sharp crack and crash of German high-explosive 
shells. 

Instantly the traiq^was a hive of excitement. 
Bark, hark, boom came back those waves of sound. 
A window flew up, another followed, and the full 
and incessant roar of distant battle surged in 
with the morning sun. 

War! 

It was in the air, and yet it was nowhere. 

Little peasant houses, stage-like through the 
mist, sent up wee columns of smoke from their 
kindling fires. An old man, dressed like a page 
from a nursery-book, puttered in his garden, but 
straightened up and waved to us as we fled by. 
A tiny little town popped past, another, and then 
another, and the inhabitants toddled to their gates 
and waved and called in the high falsetto voices 
of old age. An automobile, with the chauffeur 
bent low over the wheel, plunged round a corner 
and stopped in a cloud of dust and explosive 



34 '^LADIES FEOM HELL" 

French expletives ; and through it all and by it all 
we raced, while the tumult of battle became ever 
more audible. 

After an unforgivably long time the train 
stopped, hesitated, and crept into a station. On 
the platform were a group of kilted officers, repre- 
sentatives of the battalion to which we were going. 
Stiff and sleepy from hours of travel, we lumbered 
out of the coach, amid a clutter of equipment, and 
lined up, while the waiting captain briefly and hur- 
riedly welcomed us to our new quarters. 

Then, with two pipers at our head, we swung 
eagerly out into a cross-road, turned to the left, 
and stretched out, a long, party-colored line, down 
one of those typical, cobbled French roads, lined 
with its long, lean poplar-trees. 

A staff automobile, drab-colored and mud- 
spattered, flashed by, oblivious of ruts and bumps 
and all other traffic. At a cross-road a seemingly 
endless line of huge khaki-colored transports, 
laden with food and ammunition for the front, 
rumbled and rattled by. All day long this line 
wound on, endless, tireless, a monument* to the 
tremendous appetite of war and to the efficiency 
of the British War Office. 

By the wayside quaint little thatched peasant 
huts crept up to meet us, and crawled away into 
the dusty distance. Old folks — always old folks 



FRANCE 35 

— toddled about, pursuing the humble duty of their 
age — to the grim accompaniment of distant, but 
continuous, gun-fire. 

At last we trudged into the town of Alougne, 
where we were billeted. I, fortunately, was 
quartered with an old French woman, a wrinkled, 
bespectacled old grandmother of wondrous sweet- 
ness. Her **boys," she called us; ** Mother'' we 
called her. There were thirty-five of us stationed 
with her, and, as I came up, some of the boys who 
had just returned from the firing-line were noisily 
enjoying their first bath in five weeks. 

We of the new draft looked on wide-eyed, wor- 
shiping the naked heroes of the trench, and later 
some of a more practical turn of mind helped our 
adopted mother with her little household chores, 
her garden, or her much-beloved cow. One of the 
city-bred chaps of London gallantly offered to 
milk her cow for her. 

'^Non," said Mother Lecoq, smiling broadly at 
his blissful ignorance ; and then, in exquisitely bad 
English; *^One tried to milk her las' week; he 
still dans VhopitaL Ma vacJie no friend of 
Tommy." And with that Mother Lecoq rolled 
off with her milking-pail to do the task herself. 
After viewing ma vacJie, I am inclined to believe 
the tale. 

By evening the old-timers were sufficiently 



36 **LADIES FROM HELL'' 

washed and polished to satisfy even the most 
fastidious, and we gathered around our coffee and 
milk, with an appetite whetted for the tales that 
were certain to come forth with the dusk and the 
reminiscent glow of lighted pipe and cigarette. 

After considerable coaxing, Pete — we never did 
learn his last name — grudgingly agreed to tell of 
his latest escapade in no-man's-land. 

Pete was about as big as a minute and as bash- 
ful as a two-year-old child. To extract a tale 
from him was a task ; but, once in it, he gave him- 
self over to the telling with a gusto of a profes- 
sional raconteur. 

It seems that he had been given orders to take 
a little excursion out into no-man's-land in order 
to locate a German machine-gun emplacement 
which had been proving needlessly annoying to 
one of our communication trenches for two or 
three days. 

During the day he took his bearings and ar- 
ranged a private code of signals with the listening- 
post from which he would depart, and to which 
he planned to return after the completion of his 
task. 

Promptly at the appointed hour he went over 
the top and stumbled across the pitted surface 
of no-man's-land. Everything went smoothly, 
enough, and he was well on his return journey 



FRANCE 37 

with the desired information stowed away m his 
pocket when a flare hissed up into the sky and 
turned no-man 's-land into a river of calcium light. 

At that moment, Pete was only about seventy 
yards from the German trenches and he pros- 
trated himself with a curse and a prayer for luck. 
As he fell, his eye caught a movement to his left, 
and he dimly saw three helmeted figures, like him- 
self groveling in the mud, German reconnoitering 
patrols in no-man's-land. 

Instantly he ripped his revolver out, but re- 
turned it to its place with equal despatch, for 
in such circumstances indiscriminate shooting is 
the height of folly. Any shot in no-man's-land 
is likely to bring down a hail of bullets from both 
the opposing trenches — bullets that seek out friend 
and foe with equal favor and equally disastrous 
results. 

There is an unwritten law, founded on stern 
necessity, that governs no-man's-land. While all 
patrols in this forbidden territory carry revolvers, 
they are seldom used, for obvious reasons. When 
hostile parties meet, if they be of equal strength, 
they pass each other with an exchange of horrible 
threats, but little else. However, if one patrol 
is stronger than the other, it may endeavor to cap- 
ture the weaker party, but always without firing, 
if possible. Firing a shot in this God-forsaken 



38 ** LADIES FROM HELL'' 

territory is like lighting a match in a powder- 
magazine. It is about as certain a method of sui- 
cide as has yet been discovered. 

But to return to Pete. The German patrol was 
only about twenty or twenty-five yards from Pete 
when the flare flashed up, and as darkness again 
settled down they worked so close to him that 
he could have touched them, had be been in a 
careless mood. t)iscretion, however, was Pete's 
middle name, and he let the Germans lead him by 
thirty or forty yards until they halted squarely 
between the outreaching arms of two English lis- 
tening-posts. 

At this psychological moment Pete, in his eager- 
ness, tripped and fell full on his face with a re- 
sounding splash. Instantly the three Germans 
dropped, and Pete resigned himself to what ap- 
peared inevitable capture. But for once the in- 
evitable failed to materialize, and the Germans 
set on about their mission and moved ahead until 
they were within one hundred and fifty yards of 
the English trench, and still exactly between the 
two outstretched listening-posts. 

Then Pete took his life in one hand and his re- 
volver in the other, fired into the night in the 
direction of the Germans — and hopped into a lis- 
tening-post. The report was not dead on the air 
before no-man's-land was ablaze with flares, and 



FRANCE 39 

the three Germans were neatly trapped squarely 
between the English listening-posts. 

The German line, scenting trouble, started up a 
fusillade, effectively preventing their own com- 
rades from returning homeward in the intervals 
between the flares of exaggerated daylight. 

During a momentary lull in the firing, while the 
English flares were withheld, a strong reconnoit- 
ering party went out from the ends of our listen- 
ing-posts, which were about seventy-five yards 
apart, and neatly pocketed the Germans, who 
were found cursing lustily and worming slowly 
Berlinward on their stomachs. 

Pete's experience provoked similar tales, some 
of actual experiences and some of a lurid nature 
that would make Diamond Dick and his associates 
as green as mint with envy. 

One story I remember particularly, for at the 
time it struck me as being ample proof of the 
necessity for rigid discipline in trenchland. 

It seems that an officer, accompanied by six 
men, planned a bit of gum-shoe work in no-man's- 
land. Word of their plans was passed down the 
line, and at the appointed hour they set out. On 
returning, they had approached to within thirty- 
five or forty yards of their own trench, when a 
lance-corporal called ^^Tiny," because he was six 
feet five in his stocking-feet, let fire at them with 



40 '* LADIES FROM HELL" 

a speed and energy imparted by six months' in- 
cessant practice. Tiny had forgotten his orders, 
and did not recall them until a familiar and acid 
voice boomed out from before his rifle-sights : 

* ^ You damn fool, you ! Want to kill your own 
menT' 

Tiny collapsed on the firing-step and hurriedly 
computed the possible extent of his damage and 
the probable severity of the forthcoming punish- 
ment. More by good fortune than design, how- 
ever, his aim had been as bad as his intentions had 
been good, and therefore six weeks at hard fatigue 
was the punishment for his temporary lapse of 
memory. 

It was amid a hurricane of similar incidents that 
the evening wore on. The men seldom if ever 
spoke of casualties, confining themselves rather 
to the humorous side of trench life or to tales of 
rare professional skill of one sort or another. 

To our avalanche of questions they gave only 
patronizing, tantalizing answers. 

*^0h, you 11 soon find out, my boy," was the 
usual response to some query that had been quiv- 
ering on our tongue for hours. 

**How does it feel to be under firel Well, were 
you ever in a bath-tub of hot water when — well, 
you just wait and see. You '11 find it 's almost ex- 
actly as I have been telling you. 'T would be a 



FRANCE 41 

crime to spoil the feeling for you by describing 
it too minutely beforehand. '^ 

But out of their idle conversation I gathered 
that of all war's manifold horrors the most 
dreaded is the waiting under fire — waiting to go 
over, to do anything that will expend your pent-up 
energies and nervous force, anything that will stop 
your thinking, anything that will stop your imagi- 
nation from running riot and making a coward 
of you despite yourself. Within a fortnight I 
sounded a loud ^^Amen^' to these complaints. 

During the course of the evening they repeatedly 
lamented the death of a certain Tommy Thomp- 
son, their machine-gun sergeant. Tommy, it 
seems, had been busily engaged in scattering his 
steel-jacketed gifts among the Germans with 
marked and invariable success. But success 
brings with it its own penalties, and early one 
morning, prior to their usual eleven o 'clock Hymn 
of Hate, the Germans started throwing over some 
heavy stuff as a token of unusual spleen. These 
shells were surprisingly well timed, and appeared 
to be focusing perilously near to Tommy's 
machine-gun emplacement. A little to the left 
they dropped, and then a little to the right; then 
one to the rear by five yards, and then one a bit 
to the front, but always creeping closer, like the 
flow of a horrible tide. 



42 ^^LADIES FROM HELL" 

Here the story-teller paused, and spat reflec- 
tively at the barn-door before continuing. The 
others stared hard into the fire. 

**I was out at a listening-post,'' resumed the 
speaker, **when a shell went over my head with a 
noise like the ** Flying Scotchman" on its run from 
London to Glasgow. I felt in my bones that she 
was the one that was going to do the work; and 
she did. I looked back, and saw the whole em- 
placement and most of the neighboring scenery 
thereabout heave up into the air in a cloud of 
nasty, brownish smoke. When the wind caught it 
away, there wasn't anything left of the place, 
and where old Tommy had been dozing was just 
a bit deeper than the rest. 

* *I went back when my time was up, and met one 
of the machine-gun crew coming back with 
Tommy's identification disk in his pocket and the 
remnants of the machine-gun on his shoulder. 

*^ *That,' said he, * is the sixth one they have 
clicked for us in the last week, and I 'm going back 
to get another. ' ' ' 

After this recital there was a prolonged silence. 
Tommy Thompson had been extremely popular 
among his mates, and one by one they withdrew 
into the cow stable, which was our boudoir for 
the nonce. 

This particular cow stable, I soon learned, was 



FRANCE 43 

on a par with its thousand fellows of northern 
France. 

It was alive with rats of an embarrassingly 
friendly disposition. That was my first experi- 
ence with rats on such terms of intimacy. To 
this day a rat running across my face will wake 
me, but that night a rat scampering across my 
wrist sufficed to wake the echoes of the entire 
neighborhood. I was sternly cautioned to be 
scrupulously silent, else I might wake not only 
the echoes, but the remainder of the rats. This 
sage advice had the desired effect until two of 
the little creatures engaged in a friendly sparring 
match, within three feet of my head. I hastily 
seized my rifle, and managed to place its butt 
neatly upon the upturned face of a chap three rows 
farther down the line. Forthwith I was pro- 
nounced worse than the Boche himself, and was 
deposited outside of the shed for the balance of 
the night, that my comrades might enjoy the 
silence and the rats undisturbed. 

But even in the open I was not alone. At three 
'clock I woke with a feeling that was a cross be- 
tween an itch and a bite. Shortly, however, the 
itch disappeared completely, and gave way to a 
series of unmistakable and undeniable bites. The 
** crawlers'' were among us. Crawlers, be it 
known, is a popular and esthetic cognomen for lice, 



44 ** LADIES FROM HELL" 

plain body-lice. They are particularly friendly 
with the Scottish, owing to the comfortable quar- 
ters afforded by the Scottish pleated kilt. 

By morning we of the new draft were thor- 
oughly aroused to their presence, and an aston- 
ishing and horrible array of germicides appeared 
in protest. Most of us had come armed to the 
teeth for these much advertised creatures, and we 
longed to try conclusions with them. 

The conclusions, however, were all in favor 
of Monsieur the Crawler. He is invincible. 
Powders guaranteed to kill anything on four feet 
or centipedes, are as nothing to his Satanic 
Majesty. A patent grease with which you are 
supposed to butter your body appears to be a 
haven of refuge and a mine of nourishment for 
him. 

After experimenting for a few hours with all 
our powders, greases, ointments, and a mixture of 
all three, we retreated before the inevitable, and 
joined that day's crawler party about a bonfire, 
in which our contributions were deposited as fast 
as we could locate them and convince them of our 
earnestness. 

And over us always floated the tireless boom 
and crackle of the battle. We wanted to be in it. 
The older men, with their good-natured bantering, 
had made us feel woefully out of it. We longed 



FRANCE 45 

to duplicate their experiences, to be able to speak 
casually of bombs and shell-fire, as if we lived and 
thrived upon the stuff. There was no feeling of 
fear or dread ; but the nervous strain of waiting, 
coupled with the monotonous work about the billet, 
had its usual effect, and soon, for lack of other 
amusement, Tommy, new and old alike, fell back 
upon his genteel and ever-handy pastime of grous- 
ing. 

This business of grousing is Tommy's foremost 
and dearest accomplishment. He didn't invent 
it, but he has perfected it to an unbelievable de- 
gree. If Tommy can't grouse and grumble about 
the weather or the fit of his socks, he will pick upon 
his sergeant. If the sergeant, by some stroke of 
Deity, is flawless, the commissary department will 
be aired to the breezes. If the commissary de- 
partment has furnished agreeable grub of late, 
't will be the post-office which has failed in its duty. 
Always your Tommy will find something seriously 
wrong if he really sets out to do so. But at the 
bottom of it all is nothing but a big heart and 
a desire for a little encouragement and sympathy ; 
which, if not satisfied immediately, begets the de- 
sire to have revenge on the nearest object. Grous- 
ing is nothing but a poor substitute for sympathy, 
and it is as harmless and as meaningless as a 
lassie's smile. 



46 '^LADIES FROM HELL'' 

For four days we rested and ranted in our billet 
behind the firing-line, while the grumbling of 
Tommy and the growling of the battle-front be- 
came steadily more noticeable. Which of the 
two rumblings brought the welcome order to be 
otf , I do not know ; I only know that it came, and 
early on the fourth day of our stay we formed up 
and prepared to leave. 

As I ran out of the gate to join my company, 
our old hostess called to me, and, flushing like a 
school-girl, breathlessly handed me a wee bundle. 

*'Voici, mon fits/' she said, ^*you keep him, an' 
do not forget moi et ma vache/' 

With that she turned back, waved me a pretty 
good-by, and thew a kiss to all of us as gaily as a 
maid of one fourth her age. 

I opened her humble packet, and a worn and 
battered rosary fell out into my palm. Touched 
by the sentiment, I poured it into my breast pocket, 
and to this day I carry it, half as a talisman of 
good fortune, and half as a reminder of old 
Madame Lecoq and her indomitable vache. She 
calls up a vision of all France personified, that 
gay old soul who had given her three sons, yet, 
for all her sorrows, kept a brave spirit. 

As we swung away through the village, bent old 
figures waved to us, some gaily, some gravely, 
from each little doorway and garden, and a horde 



FRANCE 47 

of chattering children followed us, just as I used 
to follow a traveling-show, wide-eyed and wonder- 
ing. Far out to the edge of the town they trotted 
beside us, and would have continued on indefi- 
nitely, I firmly believe, had not we ourselves 
ordered them back. 

And how we hated to see those kiddies go! 
French they were, foreign to us as foreign could 
be, but kiddies still, and reminders of home. To 
send them back was to snap the last tie that must 
ever link man to home and fireside. 

As the tail of their chattering procession dis- 
appeared around a bend, we settled down to the 
wearisome grind of march. Dust welled up all 
about us. It was hot, desperately hot for May, 
and our tongues soon became thick and leather- 
like. Some of the boys sucked incessantly on 
malted milk tablets, and what a godsend they 
were. Aside from their slight nourishment, they 
helped wonderfully in alleviating thirst, the 
grim specter of which dogged us all day long. 

By noon we had covered about half our journey 
to Richbourg St. Vaast, but only a fifteen-minute 
halt was allowed before we were again up and 
away, gray, dust-covered ghosts plodding through 
a mist of chalky atmosphere. Toward evening 
a sky-line rose up to meet us. It was the high- 
water mark of the German advance in that sector. 



48 *' LADIES FROM HELL'' 

What the name of that villa'ge was I do not 
know. It was lost with the viUage itself, perhaps. 
Not a house was left ; as far as the eye could reach 
to the left and to the right was only ruin and 
then more ruin. A chimney, gaunt and unreal in 
the evening light, jutted up into the sky ; a solid 
wall, perhaps, or a roof, but never the two to- 
gether. Through some broken wall or open door- 
way one could still see the little homey scenes, 
a bed, a chair or two beside a shattered hearth, 
a table with the dishes still resting on it. In the 
center of the village stood what was once a church, 
now a rubbish-pile of blasted brick and multi- 
colored plaster. In the ditch beside the road were 
occasional dead horses, loathsome objects. A lean 
dog rested across the shattered threshold of one 
house, and near by, in eternal truce, were the bat- 
tered remains of his ancient enemy, the family 
tabby ; but the family were gone, unless the little 
cross in the doorway and the mound of new earth 
perchance marked the last resting-place of the 
owner. 

Such sights were new to us, and they had their 
full etf ect. Laughter and talking died, and curses, 
mumbled through clenched teeth, took their place. 
The spirit of France sifted down upon us and 
took up its abode in our hearts. 

From soldiers in name, this village, a habita- 



FRANCE 49 

tion fit only for crows and scurrying rats, turned 
us into soldiers in fact; and as we stumbled 
wearily on, grumbling was gone, and grim, silent 
determination had taken its place — determination 
to avenge those roadside crosses, those homes, and, 
yes, that lifeless dog and cat, dumb, but eloquent 
symbols of homes violated, firesides wantonly 
wrecked, women and children murdered or car- 
ried away to a bondage more horrible by far than 
death itself. 

Our billet that night was a war-racked house. 
The windows were gone, the door swung drunk- 
enly on a broken hinge, the garden was a hole 
half filled with brackish water, the walls were 
staggering uncertainly, and the little orchard was 
a mass of charred and jagged stumps. It had 
been a home once, and a home it was again to a 
score of dusty, kilted Tommies; for Tommy's 
home is where he hangs his hat. 

But scant time we had to enjoy its rude com- 
forts, for ten of us were ordered out to the firing- 
line. Our excitement was intense; but it was 
dampened when, instead of guns, we were handed 
shovels, and, instead of cartridges, pickaxes. 
War, you know, is not all shooting; ninety per 
cent, of it is hard, laborious work. 

After being cautioned to make no noise and 
to beware of all light, we stole forward through 



50 ''LADIES FROM HELL^' 

the night to a point about four hundred yards be- 
hind the firing-line, where a communication trench 
required lengthening and deepening. Here for 
the first time I saw the scene for which I had been 
in training these six months past. 

Spread out before me like a panorama, as far 
as the eye could reach, were the trenches, out- 
lined by hundreds of twinkling, flashing star-shells, 
some red, some green, others yellow or white. 
Blot out the sounds and the unmistakable odor, 
and it might have been a fireworks display at some 
summer amusement-park. But the sounds ! Who 
can describe the sounds of no-man's-land and its 
environs at night 1 There is the nasty hollow rat- 
a-tat-tat of the machine-gun, now far oif and dull, 
now sharp and staccato, like a snare-drum, as its 
hungry mouth sweeps in your direction. Then 
comes a series of echoes, hollow, sinister echoes, 
that you feel as much as hear. A spent bullet 
whistles past you, and dies away in the distance ; 
a big gun booms down from afar; and over it all 
rises the intangible sound of men moving, living 
things living, or transports groaning up, and a 
medley of nameless noises that arise from no- 
where, yet are everywhere in no-man's-land. And 
all about you is the smell of dank water, of black- 
ness that is all the blacker for the distant star- 
shells, of dead and living things, all bound together 



FEANCE 51 

into an odor that is the property of no place but 
no-man's-land. 

As we began to dig, the heavens opened np, and 
in five minutes we were ankle-deep in mud and 
blaspheming our way through the stickiest soil 
that ever cursed mankind. It took superhuman 
effort to get it on your shovel and equally super- 
human effort to get it off. The Creator made that 
soil to stay put. As we struggled with our shovels 
and picks, a merry company of rifle-bullets, di- 
rected at no place in particular, kept up a medley 
of falsetto whines above our heads. Off to our left 
had been a wood, — I use the past tense advisedly 
— for now there remained only a collection of 
stumps and prostrate branches outlined black and 
phantom-like against the sky. To our right was 
an ancient cabbage-field long since gone to the 
great beyond. Hour on hour we struggled on 
through that gum-like soil, until my knees wobbled 
and my breath came hard ; but I, like the others, 
labored on. 

There is something about the firing-line that 
tightens your sinews and lends a triple toughness 
to your muscles. I have seen men fight for days, 
uncomplaining and unfatigued; I have seen them 
fight for days and labor for nights without thought 
of rest. I have seen men go through the trials of 
hell, and do it smilingly and easily, apparently 



52 ^^ LADIES FROM HELL'' 

blessed with an unfailing fountain of strength; 
and then I have seen these same tireless workers 
go back to the billet when their labors are at an 
end, and collapse in a heap, spent utterly. 

There is a species of auto-intoxication that per- 
vades trenchdom. Men are dying all about you, 
and in the face of death, life's uttermost efforts 
seem puny and small. Of course you never really 
reason it out that way, at least I know I never 
did ; but the fact that others are sticking it out, 
that others are holding and giving their all, must 
have an unconscious reaction that draws upon un- 
suspected wells of nervous and physical strength. 

Perhaps no such strength buoyed us up that 
night. It was probably the excitement and the 
novelty of it all, for it is a novelty to hear bullets 
whining past when the swiftest messenger of death 
with which you have had experience is a London 
taxicab ; it is a novelty to picture the Huns crouch- 
ing over there, a few hundred yards away from 
you ; it is a novelty that I wish every man might 
experience, and stop with the experiencing. 

Just as the first hint of morning specked the 
sky we stumbled back to our billet, tired as no 
human was ever tired before. Not a man spoke ; 
even the firing-line was passably quiet. You 
could hear the German transports pounding 
along faintly over the cobbled roads, and I re- 



FEANCE 53 

member vaguely wondering why we did n 't drop a 
shell in their direction. A ** greenhorn" is likely 
to be remarkably generous with ammunition. 

No hot meal awaited us, just a scant pile of straw 
that looked better and felt softer than the mat- 
tress in the guest-room at home. Four hours 
flashed away, and the morning broke with the com- 
fortable sound of a British field-piece barking 
away angrily, like a little dog at a treed cat. I 
tested myself experimentally for symptoms of a 
cold, but found not the slightest trace. 

It is an interesting thing that despite the hor- 
rible and all pervading dampness of the firing- 
line there is little sickness. In the midst of all the 
hardships and privations there seems to be no 
room for the petty annoyances of civilian life. 
It is seldom that a man visits a medical officer. 
Blistered feet are the soldier's foremost ailment, 
yet many a man will go for days with his feet 
blood-soaked from blisters rather than seek a 
medical officer for remedies. It is not bravado; 
in the trenches you don't place much importance 
on such things. After all, life is a matter of com- 
parisons. You are rich in my estimation be- 
cause I am poorer than you, and I am comfortable 
despite blistered feet, because you have lost an 
arm or perhaps a leg. So it goes. In the midst 
of death there is no room for colds or fevers. 



54 '* LADIES FEOM HELL'^ 

There are so many more expeditious methods of 
making your exit from this world that the old- 
fashioned maladies have quite lost caste on the 
firing-line. 

Our next billet was another empty shell of a 
house, afloat on a sea of mud. All the land there- 
about had seen much of shell-fire, and presented 
the general appearance of a huge black lake that 
had been beaten into a raging fury and then frozen 
as it ran. Huge holes, great billows of earth, with 
brambles and bricks floating in weird, unnatural 
positions upon its surface. 

For several days. we worked at odd, meaning- 
less jobs about the place, gathering a vast fimd of 
information and experience. I presume that this 
is what we were supposed to do, to become accli- 
mated to the sights and sounds, to familiarize our- 
selves with the modus operandi of the front-line. 
We rapidly became rather set in our ways. Like 
old bachelors, we acquired little idiosyncrasies. 
Experiences that would have filled a volume a 
month before were now ignored and forgotten; 
and why not ? Here we were, hovering about the 
brink of the Hun-made hell. We never expected 
to return to familiar sights and sounds except on 
crutches or on a stretcher; so why should we be- 
come ruffled at the sound of an onrushing shell? 



FRANCE 55 

Fatalism? Oh, perhaps, but not bravado; just a 
stoical complacency that takes possession of you 
after the first five or six shells have failed to make 
you their mark. 

I don^t mean to say that shell-fire is welcome. 
No man who speaks the truth can aver that he has 
any hankering after the heavy stuff. He may 
become accustomed to rifle-fire, to the red-hot hell 
of machine-gun fire, but shell-fire has a horror 
all its own. You never really get accustomed to 
it, and it is for that reason that many men are 
captured after a heavy shelling. They are un- 
hurt, but the horror of continued shelling saps 
their will to fight, and leaves them dumb and dazed 
and void of all will to think or do. 

It was in this atmosphere of stray shells and 
rifle-fire that we acquired our trench legs. Then 
came the order to move up another notch. This 
proved to be six hundred yards from the front 
trenches, and for the next three days we had box- 
seats for the grand performance. From the real 
we approached what was once the unreal, and now 
the unreal proved far more real and much more 
full of life than the most important event of our 
little yesterdays. 

My first night at the new billet I was detailed 
off to ration fatigue, which in plain English is 



56 '^LADIES FEOM HELL" 

the job of getting the company's rations from the 
cook. Our cooks were stationed at a spot known 
as ** Windy Corners,'' so named because of the 
Teuton's earnest endeavors to wipe it out of ex- 
istence. 

The Teuton, let me say, is a wise bird, and he 
has an uncanny way of knowing your movements 
before you yourself become aware of them. 
French civilian traitors are usually to blame. In 
fact, nothing so endeared Sir Douglas Haig 
to the men as his order relegating non-com- 
batants to the rear by fifteen miles. After this 
order went into effect the Hun's remarkable guess- 
work fell off markedly. Prior to that time I had 
seen instance after instance where traitorous 
guidance was evident. 

One peculiarly clever case comes to my mind. 
Near us, at one time, on the firing-line, was a 
house. For days we called it the ** charmed cha- 
teau" because it alone of all its neighbors re- 
mained standing. In our early innocence we mar- 
veled at it, and talked vacantly of supernatural 
causes, until an officer remarked a rather striking 
coincidence. When any considerable company of 
our men went forward through one or more com- 
munication trenches, the chimney of the ** charmed 
chateau" would emit a sudden series of smoke- 
puffs, and instanter the German shells would be- 



FRANCE 57 

gin to flit about with remarkable exactness. In 
the telling it seems simple enough, and yet no one 
had noticed this coincidence before. 

There was an elderly woman living in the place, 
and I can testify that she was a marvelous cook. 
Her home, partly by reason of her kindness and 
her cooking, aided, perhaps, by her remarkable 
immunity from shell-fire, soon became a gather- 
ing-place for our officers. She was always most 
solicitous about our health, and showed an ap- 
parently justifiable interest in our movements. 
She also had a dog. Even the dog was friendly, 
and, like the woman, was soon adopted as a part 
of our trench family. But for the canniness of 
one of our superior officers she and her dog might 
still be dishing out soup with one hand and shrap- 
nel with the other. 

When suspicion was at last centered upon her, 
the first move was to watch the house and the dog. 
Two days later the dog appeared innocently me- 
andering homeward from the direction of the 
trenches. Three Tommies waylaid the unaccount- 
ably shy Fido and abstracted a neat bundle of 
Oerman memoranda from his tubular collar. Our 
dear French friend had kept the Hun batteries 
well supplied with full data, and the mystery of 
their remarkably well-ordered fire disappeared 
forthwith. 



58 *^ LADIES FROM HELL" 

Two hours after her arrest her home was vis- 
ited by a German high-explosive shell. Who told 
them of her arrest? Ask the Huns. They have a 
system all their own. 

But to return to ** Windy Corners" and the 
cookers. The roadway ran parallel with the 
trenches and within tempting rifle-range; but it 
was nearly eight o'clock and dark, so that Bill 
Nichols and I scampered along with little fear of 
detection. We reached the cookers, we filled our 
sacks, and we started back, quite overflowing with 
the joy of living and a great contempt for our 
enemies across the ditch. 

There was a fool with us. I was that fool. I 
started whistling **Tipperary." About the first 
eight notes had been confided to the night air when 
a bullet hit the road three feet in front of me, and 
pi-i-i — nged away in the dark. I needed no sec- 
ond invitation, but dropped *^Tipperary," the bis- 
cuits, and everything that would impede my rapid 
progress, in a heap on the road, and made a run 
for it. 

The billet was all there to meet me, including 
the sergeant. 

* ^ Where are the rations, Pink 1 ' ' said he. 

**Down the road, sir," I replied between puffs. 

**What the hell? Down the road?" he coun- 
tered. 



FRANCE 59 

I explained that machine-gun fire had no great 
allurements for me, and that therefore I had de- 
parted rather hastily without the rations. But 
my sad tale produced no sympathy, only an order 
to go back and get the grub. 

My progress on the return trip was via a ditch, 
which put twelve feet of solid roadway between 
me and the Huns' rifle practice. Half-way back 
I met Nichols, progressing stealthily like a child 
with a stolen cooky. He, too, had discovered the 
ditch and was making good use of it. 

My return with the biscuits was the reverse of 
what I had pictured. I had visions of being wel- 
comed as a hero of some note, perhaps of being 
mentioned for bravery under fire ; but I was acidly 
informed that ten days' extra fatigue was my pun- 
ishment for not obeying orders. I had been told 
to bring back the rations, and I had returned with- 
out them. 

For the benefit of the reader I will pass over the 
next ten days, with their incessant round of tire- 
some duties of a nature usually delegated to those 
in disgrace in the army. 



CHAPTER III 

THE BATTLE FOR LILLE 

EARLY in May, 1915, I was enjoying a few 
hours off duty when I met an artillery officer 
who was stringing wires from the front-line ob- 
servation positions to the batteries at the rear. 

* * Something big coming off ? ^ ' said I. 

**Just that, my son,'' was the non-committal 
reply. 

This opening seemed interesting, if difficult, and 
I struck up a precarious conversation with the 
taciturn old fellow. Two hours of hard work on 
my part netted the information that the long- 
delayed battle for Lille was in the making. 

For days past our artillery preparations had 
been active in the extreme. The advance, I gath- 
ered, was to be over a line about fifteen hundred 
yards wide, and from one thousand to twelve hun- 
dred artillery pieces were to be concentrated upon 
that area. According to my oracle, the advance 
would be simplicity itself, merely a matter of a 
few hours ' artillery fire, and then through the gap 
and on to Lille. 



THE BATTLE FOR LILLE 61 

With these hearty assurances bubbling in my 
heart, I ran back to the billet and spread the glad 
news among the boys. Immediately the optimists 
and the pessimists took sides, and the battle be- 
fore Lille was fought out according to their re- 
spective views. The old-timers were particularly 
pessimistic, and for good reason. They had been 
through the Marne, when the Allied artillery was 
noticeable principally for its absence, and hence 
word of dominance in artillery-fire was consid- 
ered too good to be worth the hearing. 

At best, they maintained, a battle is merely a 
matter of luck, and no human brain can forecast 
the outcome with any degree of accuracy, no mat- 
ter how elaborate the preparations may be. Fur- 
thermore, we had been given to understand that 
the Germans far outnumbered us, and this fact, 
coupled with the skepticism concerning our artil- 
lery, held sway until the night of May 8, when 
word came through that on the morrow, Sunday, 
we would make the long-heralded advance upon 
Lille. 

With the formal news of the impending battle, 
all skepticism vanished. In its place appeared 
only optimism and a great eagerness for the on- 
slaught. 

Saturday evening, the evening before the battle, 
we gathered in a shell-proof dugout, where we 



62 '* LADIES FROM HELL" 

held high carnival around a bowl of punch. Each 
lad told his favorite story or sang his favorite 
song. The health of the British Army and Navy 
was drunk a score of times. The battle of the 
coming day was fought and won unquestionably. 
The spinal cord of the beast was broken. We 
marched on and on and on into Berlin. Glowing 
faces grew gay under the mellow, congenial influ- 
ence of this ^^Last Supper," as we flippantly 
called it. 

Evening dusk came, we fell into line, and set off 
on the road which led to * * Windy Comers ' ' and to 
Lille. 

At the usual place the German machine-guns 
picked us up, and for safety's sake we took to the 
ditch for protection. Across field after field, pit- 
ted like the face of the moon, we stumbled, often 
up to our knees in icy, sticky mud; but about mid- 
night we reached a little wood two miles behind 
the line, and here we bivouacked for the night. 

And here let me offer my very sincere respects 
to the commander of our platoon, Mr. Findley. 
He had risen from the ranks and had been deco- 
rated with the D.C.M.; and a more conscientious 
officer I have never known. No matter what his 
own problems or discomforts, he never forgot 
**his boys." Around, among us he circulated, 
now, urging us to be of good cheer, telling of the 



THE BATTLE FOR LILLE 63 

invincible support of our artillery, tucking water- 
proof sheets a little tighter, adjusting a haversack 
for one, a head-rest for another, always helping 
to make us as comfortable as circumstances would 
permit. He was self-forgetful, simple, unassum- 
ing; always one of us, yet at all times thoroughly 
respected. And that night was his last night on 
earth. 

The front was as quiet as a sepulcher. From 
far to the right, however, where the French held 
the line, came the incessant rumble and crackle of 
battle. We who knew the code could make out the 
ebb and flow of the fight from where we lay by 
the stream of star-shells and multicolored flares. 

No one slept; we lay there relaxed, staring up 
at the stars. God seemed very near to us that 
night. When the morning may bring your last 
day on earth, God becomes a very real and per- 
sonal being and not some far-off, intangible Deity. 
No man can go into the trenches and long remain 
an atheist. He may, and usually does, blaspheme 
magnificently in the heat of battle, but in the cool 
quiet of night, when only the sky is overhead, he 
knows beyond all question that there is a God. 
I believe that war has converted more men to a 
true Christianity than any other force of modern 
times. 

War's Christianity is not the sort that sings 



64 *^ LADIES FROM HELL'' 

hymns on public corners. It is a better sort, 
which serves and gives untiringly. 

With the morning came the silence that is pro- 
verbial before the storm. Hardly were we out of 
our waterproof sheets before the ever-present 
Mr. Findley was among us, passing out good cheer 
and chocolate. He knew from experience that 
after such a night none of us could stomach the 
usual bully beef and biscuit. 

At 4:45 a red-capped observation officer ap- 
peared from nowhere and clambered up into a 
tree-top. After an impressive period of time he 
descended with every evidence of satisfaction. 
Evidently the stage was set to a nicety and only 
awaited the actors. Birds were twittering; they 
seemed oddly out of place. Their chirpings ac- 
tually annoyed us, so tense were our nerves. A 
lark shot suddenly heavenward, and was roundly 
cursed for its efforts. 

It was 4 :59 ; one minute more and we would be 
off and away. 

As the hands of my watch touched five the earth 
shook, the heavens rolled back vast billows of 
sound, and the air quivered like a living thing. 
The quiet of a minute before was engulfed in a hell 
of sound that defied all description. As if a huge 
hand were manipulating the keys of a tremendous 
organ, the batteries, massed, some of them wheel 



THE BATTLE FOR LILLE 65 

to wheel, over that front of fifteen hundred yards, 
sent out their challenge to the German hosts. 
From an invisible thing two miles away, the front 
line burst up before us in a streak of smoke, 
heaped high, wave on wave, and shot through with 
green sulphurous fumes, scintillating like waves 
of heat on a scorching day. 

Overhead our aeroplanes roared and hummed, 
guiding and directing our fire. Pretty things 
they were, too, oddly birdlike and out of place 
amid such stern surroundings. In numbers they 
far outnumbered the German fleet, and success- 
fully held back the Teuton scouts throughout the 
day. 

As we stood drinking in this panorama, the or- 
der to advance came through, and we started for- 
ward in Indian file, three or four paces apart. 
Across the terrain we floundered, picking our way 
around shell-holes and across the debris of former 
battle-fields. There was no fear. In the midst 
of such terrific noise one becomes only a shriveled 
nonentity, incapable of conscious thought. 

As we passed in front of our batteries, the con- 
cussion doubled, tripled, and quadrupled in inten- 
sity, and the roar of a million boiler-shops ripped 
up and down that line with inhuman exactness 
and promptitude. 

The journey forward was a difficult one, but by 



66 '^LADIES FEOM HELL" 

9 :30 we were within a few hundred yards of the 
front line, and German shells were beginning to 
steal into our ranks. Across a particularly ex- 
posed space we ran, but even yet the progress of 
the battle was a mystery. No authentic word 
came back ; the trenches to the front were merely 
a vortex of greenish and white smoke. 

The Germans were concentrating their fire on 
the communication trenches and on our reserves. 
In fact, at this time the men in the front line were 
comparatively safe. We of the new draft were 
having our first experience in the gentle art of 
dodging shells. One learns at a rapid rate under 
such forced schooling. Within an hour I could 
tell with a fair degree of accuracy, or so I thought, 
the shells that bore the message **I want to get 
you.'' The shells that would break at a comfort- 
able distance seemed to have another and less 
ominous sound about them. I was mumbling 
pretty compliments to myself on my own good 
judgment when a heavy howitzer-shell burst just 
a little to my left. Instantly my newly acquired 
confidence vanished. The fear of God entered my 
heart, and, like Abraham of old, I fell flat on my 
face and remained there until the sergeant-major 
delivered a well-directed kick on a fitting portion 
of my anatomy. 

In addition to the shell-fire, we were now the 



THE BATTLE FOR LILLE 67 

recipients of the small stuff — pip-squeaks, aero 
torpedoes, whiz-bangs, and machine-gun-fire. 
Aside from shell-fire, it is machine-gun-fire that 
is the most dangerous of all. It traverses up and 
down your line like a great finger. As it kicks 
up the dust at your feet your first inclination is 
to flinch or dodge, and it takes some time before 
you realize that it is only the harmless bullet that 
you hear ; the one that gets you is as silent as the 
path to which it leads you. 

After two hours of this small stuff we behaved 
like well-seasoned troops, for we realized fully the 
utter futility of dodging, and the inevitable fact 
that our personal bullet would bring lio warning 
spat to guide us. 

The pip-squeak, however, continued to annoy 
me. In fact, I never could get really used to their 
acrobatics. The father of the pip-squeak is that 
whistling pinwheel of the fireworks display, which 
churns upward fifty or a hundred feet, skids, and 
then explodes in a thousand ill-chosen directions. 
You can hear a pip-squeak coming, but its crazy 
course is uncharted. Like a drunken automobile, 
it careens, now here, now there, and then back 
here again. The staggering figures following the 
explosion of a pip-squeak, however, will testify to 
its effectiveness as an instrument of destruction. 

After another half -hour's delay there came an- 



68 *^ LADIES FROM HELL" 

other run for it, and we plunged into a conununi- 
cation trench close to the parapeted dressing-sta- 
tion. 

Here the horrors of war burst in upon us in all 
their awful realism. Oh, how a chap's heart goes 
out to those poor wrecks, tottering, crawling, 
dragging themselves as best they may to the haven 
of a first-line dressing-station! You pity them, 
yes, and you envy them. Their duty is done, their 
waiting is over, they are going back ; your duty is 
ahead, your fate is uncertain. 

They say that the first wounded man you see 
remains with you throughout your life, and to this 
day I remember mine with an awful vividness. 
He was just a kid, and was sitting propped up 
against the sand-bagged parapet, by the side of 
a shell-hole filled with slimy water. Off to the 
left a frog croaked tirelessly, heedless of the hell 
about him. The wounded man 's eyes were closed, 
and his breath was coming in labored gasps. His 
tunic was thrown back, and his chest was as white 
as a babe's; but just over his heart was an ugly 
red smudge. Clean through the lung he had it, 
and as we passed by he went west, quietly and 
peacefully, like a little child moving in its sleep. 
There was none of the glory of a dying hero about 
his passing over the great divide. He had merely 



THE BATTLE FOR LILLE 69 

done his duty, having been shot on his return 
from delivering a despatch. Through will power 
only he held consciousness long enough to crawl 
back to his superior's dugout to report his duty 
finished, and then he had passed on. 

I was still struggling to throw this picture out 
of my mind when another chap came limping 
back, sweat streaming from his face and both 
hands held to his groin. 

**Got a fag, boysT' were his first words. The 
fag was instantly forthcoming, but some one had 
to light it for him, for he refused to take his hands 
from his injured side. 

**I got a pretty ^package' here,'' said he — 
** shrapnel." That single word ^^shrapneP' told 
the entire story, the story of a big gaping wound, 
and I looked at him curiously. 

**I 'm getting awfully tired, lads," were his 
next words; ^*I guess I '11 sit down." We helped 
him to a comfortable corner, where he puffed con- 
tentedly for a moment upon his borrowed ciga- 
rette, and then gasped and died. 

Crowding by us in that narrow trench, came an 
endless line of blood-soaked stretcher cases, some 
writhing in awful agony, others white and still 
with head wounds. And down on the quick and 
the dead alike beat the heat of a noonday sun. 



70 '^LADIES FEOM HELL^' 

The ghastly harvest streaming by us like a night- 
mare blanched our faces and made us ache to be 
over and done with our share. 

The waiting — yes, the boys were right — ^was 
far more wearing than any fighting that I ever 
afterward experienced. Perhaps you will not un- 
derstand the agony of waiting under fire. But 
have you ever paced the creosoted corridors of a 
hospital while some one near and dear to you 
lay up-stairs under a skylight, with white-robed, 
masked figures all about? Do you remember how 
the minutes crawled past, and how every noise 
was an explosion? Do you remember pacing the 
floor of your own room, waiting for the doctor to 
come down and tell you, *'out of danger'' or the 
reverse? Do you remember how the minutes 
passed then, and how you would have sold your 
soul itself to have set the clock ahead, if only for 
one half -hour? 

Intensify your feelings of those moments a hun- 
dred-fold, and you will have some idea of the 
agony of waiting in a trench under fire. 

By noon our artillery began its barrage fire 
with renewed fury; but the Germans were still 
returning shell for shell, and by one o 'clock many 
of our batteries were silenced. 

Then the report came back that the Goorkhas, 
those fierce Indian fighters, had taken the first 



THE BATTLE FOR LILLE 71 

line German trench ; but later in the afternoon we 
were told that they had been driven out, and still 
we huddled behind those cursed sand-bags, in- 
active, burning to be off. 

And while we waited, let me just say a word 
about those same Goorkhas. They are peculiar 
fellows, as faithful as dogs, fierce as tigers, with 
a love for their superior officers that is childlike 
in its simplicity. Many times, when one of their 
leaders is killed, the thin veneer of civilization 
which divides the Goorkha from the stone age 
peels away, and without orders or leaders they will 
go over the top, sans rifle and revolver, armed 
only with a bowie-knife and a fanatical rage that 
knows no fear or reasoning. 

The bowie-knife is the Goorkha 's favorite 
weapon, and his expertness with it is uncanny. I 
have known one to snake away across no-man's- 
land at night and tap gently on the German para- 
pet. Instantly a helmeted head bobs up in in- 
quiry, a polished blade flashes swiftly, silently, 
and a German head rolls back into the trench, 
while a Goorkha snakes back across no-man's- 
land with a fiendish gleam in his eye, and another 
story of prowess to tell to the family circle 
hunched about the meat-pots back home. 

At last came the hoped-for order, and up to the 
second line trenches we filed. But here again we 



72 ^ ^LADIES FEOM HELL'' 

were delayed. Men, some wounded, some stark 
mad, rushed past us, fruits of high-explosive shell- 
ing. A young lieutenant plunged down the trench. 
He was the sole survivor of a Welsh regiment, 
and the frightfulness of his losses had quite un- 
seated his reason. Entirely alone in our trench 
he stood, waving a light cane in one hand and a 
smoking revolver in the other, and screaming to 
the sky: 

'^ Where are my men? Good God, where are 
they? Gone? All gone?'' Then he burst into 
tears. 

A sergeant-major who had been wounded in the 
arm came running up to him. 

**Sir,'' said he, ^'let me rally your men while 
you go back to the dressing-station. I '11 get the 
boys together and bring them back to you." 

A long and heated argument ensued. The lieu- 
tenant was for rallying his own men, but the ser- 
geant-major, a big strapping fellow, with medal 
ribbons of the Indian Mutiny across his breast, 
was no mean diplomat, and at last led the lieu- 
tenant back and away from the scene from which 
he alone survived. 

We of the Scottish sat huddled together in the 
trench and saw it all and did nothing. At such 
times reason sits but lightly, and some of us joked 
horribly, some sang popular songs in hoarse, un- 



THE BATTLE FOR LILLE 73 

natural voices, others laughingly made out their 
last wills and testaments. Fritz and his wonder- 
ful war machine came in for their share of compli- 
mentary criticism and cursing. The older men 
recounted many of the ancient trench supersti- 
tions — how it is bad luck to light three cigarettes 
with the same match. For a time premonitions of 
disaster held the floor as the topic of a heated 
discussion. A veteran of the Marne swore sol- 
emnly that a controlling Deity stood between us 
and ultimate defeat, and he retold with fervent 
earnestness how the British retreated for ten days 
at the Marne, and how on the seventh day a great 
white sheet interposed itself between our men 
and the onrushing gray horde of Germans. On 
the eighth day this sheet took form and shape, 
and the Christ looked down upon our troops. 

So the minutes passed, but still the order to ad- 
vance was withheld. Another young lieutenant 
careened into the trench, bleeding freely from a 
wound in his arm. Following him came the rem- 
nants of his regiment, thirty or forty mud-covered, 
torn, and tattered men, some limping, others curs- 
ing blindly and unceasingly. Squarely in front 
of us the lieutenant formed his boys up, and then 
addressed us : 

*'Well, Jocks, here 's what 's left of us after 
half an hour up forward. You know what you 



74 ^'LADIES FROM HELL*^ 

can do for us when you go up and over the top 
this afternoon. '^ 

And individually and collectively we swore to 
avenge his losses, the losses of all England, the 
losses of France and Belgium, and the losses of 
humanity. 

But the opportunity to avenge was delayed, al- 
ways delayed. By us streamed an endless chain 
of war's fresh horrors, constant reminders of our 
duty still undone. Blood, for us, had become an 
old story. We were old men, aged immeasurably 
by six hours in helPs own kitchen, aged by six 
hours of waiting. 

Oh, it is the waiting that tells, my friend. You 
can fight eternally, you can fight and die, but the 
horror of waiting is unbearable. You sing, you 
chatter aimlessly, you count away the seconds and 
the minutes, while over you stream the Teuton 
shells, and by you flows the awfulness of war, end- 
less testimony to the efficiency of forty years of 
Teuton preparation for **der Tag.'' 

At last our major came running up. 

**Come on, boys; it 's up to us now to finish the 
job that was started this morning. We 're off; 
hurry up." There were no laggards, and up to 
the first-line reserve trenches we ran. 

It was now 2 :30. The attack, our attack, was to 



THE BATTLE FOR LILLE 75 

begin at three. Ahead of us the Black Watch had 
gone forward. Excitement rose to fever pitch. 
Our time had come, but no. At 2:50 the briga- 
dier's runner came through, bearing a counter- 
mand. If curses could have killed a man, that 
man v^ould have gone west on the double-quick. 
After delivering his order he was off to stop the 
Black Watch. 

But he never reached them. A cry went up 
from down the trench. The Black Watch were 
going over alone. Utterly regardless of machine- 
gun-fire, our heads popped up over the parapet. 
Not four hundred yards away were those chaps. 
We 'd been chatting with them two hours before. 
They were as cool as on home parade. There was 
no shouting or yelling, just a clean, collected 
string of men at double-quick, rifles at their sides, 
bounding across no-man's-land. 

There is something awful in such a sight — eight 
hundred men headed for sure destruction, and 
with no chance to help them. We were fascinated 
by the spectacle. Our captain took in the situa- 
tion at a glance, and rushed to the brigadier's dug- 
out, where he pleaded and begged to be allowed 
to go over with them ; but already the brigadier 
had used too many men. The charge of the Black 
Watch was a mistake ; they had failed to receive 



76 ^* LADIES FROM HELL'' 

the countermand. At some place between us and 
them the despatch-bearer had fallen, and eight 
hundred men went with him. 

It was perhaps seven or eight hundred yards 
from our trenches to the German line, nearly half 
a mile, and over this space went the ** Ladies from 
Hell," as the Germans call the Scottishers. Even 
the Hun, with all his horrors, seemed stunned by 
their advance. The shell-fire slackened visibly, 
and only the machine-gun bullets remained to re- 
mind us of our personal danger. 

That day, it is estimated, the Germans had a 
machine-gun for every five yards of front. A 
machine-gun can pour out six hundred to six hun- 
dred and fifty bullets per minute. It was into this 
hail of steel that our friends, the Black Watch, 
plunged. 

A hush fell over our lines. Half-way across, 
and only a scant six hundred of the original eight 
hundred remained. Another hundred yards took 
their toll, another, and then another. Then they 
came to the dummy trench, some twenty-five or 
thirty yards in front of the German first line. 
This dummy trench was filled with barbed wire, 
and a rivulet had been turned into it for the occa- 
sion. Two hundred men reached that trench, two 
hundred men went into it, but only one hundred 
crossed it and dashed on over the last few yards. 



THE BATTLE FOR LILLE 77 

Then they were gone from sight. Sixty of the 
eight hundred had reached the German trench. 
It was all over; but, no! Their signaler is on 
the German parapet calling for help, and he is 
calling for the Scottish, for us ! And we had or- 
ders to stay! God, man, it was awful! During 
those minutes of agony I grew old. The signaler 
had barely finished his message when he was shot 
do\vTi, and we sank back into our trench, dumb 
with the horror of it all. That stretch of no- 
man's-land, dotted with still or writhing figures, 
swam before my eyes. 

A cry went up. They were coming back. Yes, 
sure enough, twenty-five or thirty of them, di- 
vested of all equipment, were running back to- 
ward us. 

Then the heart that actuates the Teuton army 
showed itself for what it was. Running across 
no-man's-land came thirty brave lads who had 
fought a brave fight and lost. They were entitled 
to the honor of any soldier, be he friend or foe; 
but do you think they got it from the Hun? 
They did not. 

Here they came running toward us, the last of 
eight hundred. Behind them you could hear the 
crack of a German machine-gun going into action. 
Like pigeons at a pigeon shoot they were trapped, 
but without half the chance of escape that we give 



78 ^^ LADIES FROM HELL'' 

the bird. Away over to the left I saw McDonald 
stagger and collapse. On across that fleeing line 
of heroes traversed that German machine-gun. 
One by one the boys dropped until not one re- 
mained. KULTIJR! 

•Our men at first were dazed ; they did n't believe 
their own eyes. It was impossible barbarism. 
Thirty men entitled to all the scant privileges of 
war had been shot down like gutter-dogs. Then, 
as the reality broke in upon us, a cry went up, and 
a demand to go over and avenge that wholesale 
mu»rder. If discipline was ever put to the test it 
was then. It seemed for a minute as though noth- 
ing could restrain that wild rage, that thirst for 
vengeance, that desire to rid ourselves of the hid- 
eous sense of impotence in the face of such hor- 
rors. But the months of training told, and with 
a few steadying words the officers kept control of 
the situation. 

The day was done. Our artillery had failed to 
sever the German barbed wire sufficiently, and as 
our men cut away at it they had been shot down 
like rats. Lille was still to be won. 

The artillery of both sides still worked away 
intermittently, but the work was done, though far 
from finished. 

Like a continuous bad dream the wounded 
drifted past us, but we did not see or hear them. 



THE BATTLE FOR LILLE 79 

It was out yonder, in no-man's-land, that we lived, 
out there where our men lay kicking their last, 
under the heat of an afternoon sun. But even 
yet the day had not completed its tale of horror 
for us. 

A random howitzer-shell shrieked overhead. 
Closer and closer it came. There was a flash, a 
stunning concussion, and our Mr. Findley rolled 
out of the smoke. A dozen of us rushed up to him 
and tried to stop the flow of blood from the wound 
in his side. He was in frightful agony. Beads 
of icy sweat stood out on his forehead, and his 
eyes burned like coals. Near him lay three other 
boys of the London Scottish. He saw them, and 
motioned to us to stop in our work. 

** Don't mind me, fellows," he said; **look after 
those poor chaps over there. I '11 be all right — 
soon." 

At this juncture Mr. Steadman, our command- 
ing officer, rushed up and ordered a stretcher ; but 
poor Findley was gone. They got him back of 
the lines all right, but somewhere on the rough 
road between there and the hospital at Bethune 
he went west, and as he went the British Empire 
lost a man among men, a Christian of war's awful 
making. 

Volunteers were asked for to go out into no- 
man's-land that night and bring in the wounded. 



80 ^^ LADIES FROM HELL'' 

My pal Nichols and I stepped forward, as did the 
vast majority of our company. We were fortu- 
nate enough to be selected. 

Just as we were leaving for the rear, another 
shell found us, and ten of our number felt its bite. 
I knew them all intimately. Eight of them never 
reached the hospital. Callendar had a leg off, and 
one of the others had had his head blown off. 
Three fell where they stood. I thought they had 
fainted, but later I learned that they had been 
killed by the concussion. 

From this scene we stretcher-bearers went back 
for final instructions to the dressing-station ; and, 
oh, the horror of that dressing-station! Long 
rows of wounded, mud- and blood-bespattered 
wrecks, some groaning softly, others quiet, still 
others puffing cigarettes. A canvas curtain 
flashed back, and three surgeons were revealed 
under the oil-lamp. 

Comparatively few operations are performed at 
the dressing-station ; only when seconds divide life 
from death does the dressing-station do aught but 
temporary bandaging. From this first station you 
are sent to a station farther back, where your 
wounds are minutely examined, and you are 
marked for Blighty or for a field hospital, as the 
case may indicate. 

At nine, as darkness fell, we went out into no- 



THE BATTLE FOR LILLE 81 

man's-land for the first time since we had come 
to France. Darkness after a battle is a pleasing 
thing. It hides the gruesome details that day lays 
bare in horrid profusion. After the day the night 
seemed quiet, and we went from form to form 
seeking those in whom the spark of life still clung. 
As star-shells or flares sputtered upward we fell 
prone, and imitated the still figures about us. 
Between flares we worked feverishly. 

I will not describe that night. It beggars all 
description. In the heat of battle you forget the 
horror of it, but in the stillness of night it flashes 
back over you in a mighty flood. 

I remember, I will always remember, those end- 
less trips to and from the dressing-station — now 
with a chap crying softly to himself, like a little 
baby, now with one lying limp and voiceless. 
Those pleading eyes that looked up at us as we 
passed will haunt me till Berlin bows. 

*^For God^s sake, boys, take me in! I 've got 
a little wife and a kiddy at home — a kiddy with 
big blue eyes ; yes, fellows, blue eyes." 

*^0h, boys, water! God, give me water!" 

**A cigarette, men. I 'm going west soon, and 
I Ve got to have a cigarette before I start. ' ' 

Such are the echoes of battle ; but it is the still 
form, shapeless, somber, that raises no echoes, 
that calls the loudest to you. How many such 



82 ** LADIES FROM HELL'' 

forms lay out in no-man 's-land that night I do not 
know. I do not even want to know. It is enough 
to remember that call : 

**For God's sake, boys, take me in! I Ve got 
a little wife and kiddy at home — a kiddy with big 
blue eyes." 

All night we rushed back and forth from one 
hell to the other ; but as day dawned we reported 
for the last time. Half of the fellows who had 
gone out on that errand of mercy that night re- 
mained out there among the other dead and dying, 
victims of the machine-gun-fire, which sweeps up 
and down no-man's-land by night and day. 

Our battalion, on its return from the trenches, 
had been billeted fifteen miles back of the lines, 
and as the sun peered over the red rim of the 
world we trudged homeward to this billet. Those 
were the longest fifteen miles I ever covered. The 
excitement was gone, but the horror still remained. 
The reaction had set in, and Nichols and I floun- 
dered along those interminable miles of road, as 
silent as the grave which we had left. 

We found our company in a long shed, and we 
tumbled in among them, worn to the point of 
breaking. Two hours of unconsciousness, and we 
were wakened for roll-call. 

Roll-call after a battle ! It is the saddest of all 
scenes. As each man's name is called the com- 



THE BATTLE FOE LILLE 83 

pany listens. There is a silence — gone, another 
one gone, another. God ! Eoll-call after a battle 
is almost as bad as the battle itself. You re-live 
it all, you see that shell strike five yards from 
your dearest friend ; Jim, Pete, Tommy — all gone, 
and you remember how they went. 

We had but a scant eight hundred left from our 
battalion of nearly four thousand! That is roll- 
call after a battle. Thirty-two hundred names 
were called out with no answer. 

We of the London Scottish alone had clicked 
five hundred and fifty-four of our original one 
thousand, and we had been mere reserves and had 
seen none of the real fighting. 

The horror of it all is indescribable. We were 
stunned by our losses. In the heat of action we 
had hardly realized their immensity. We had 
seen individual cases, but here the vast panorama 
of horror was unrolled before us. The officers 
realized our sensations and set us free, and we 
rambled over to an orchard, a cherry orchard, in 
full bloom. 

From far off came the boom of the firing line, 
but thank God that was past for the time. We 
read letters from home, and wrote replies; we 
chatted vaguely, and rested, preparatory to the 
next assault on the German lines. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE MAN IN THE BLUE JEANS — A TRENCH RAID 

AS the afternoon wore on and our letters were 
duly written and censored, several of us 
wandered over to an estaminet. 

An estaminet is one of those denatured cafes, 
found far behind the lines, at which soft drinks 
and light refreshments may be purchased from 
the peasantry of the community. 

This estaminet was filled to overflowing with 
the f ortunates who had survived the battle of the 
previous day. Here we met the Guards Regiment 
which had gone over the top, only to retreat in 
the face of the withering Teuton machine-gun fire. 
I say we met the regiment, but what we actually 
met was a scant tenth of it, for the rest were 
either back yonder in no-man's-land or in one or 
more of the field hospitals. 

For an hour or two the battle for Lille was re- 
fought. The reason for its failure was sought out 
and found a hundred times, and at a back table 
a group of Frenchmen listened in silence. 

Then, during one of those lulls which sometimes 



THE MAN IN THE BLUE JEANS 85 

come over even the noisiest of gatherings, one of 
these taciturn Frenchmen sprang to his feet. In 
broken, but excited, English he denounced the Scot- 
tish and all we stood for. In fact, his denuncia- 
tion covered quite an extensive territory, for it 
encompassed the whole of England and Ireland 
and most of the colonies. He cursed us roundly 
as ** slackers'' who had failed to accomplish our 
objective. 

Immediately the room was in an uproar. An 
old lady, who was the proprietress, rushed in and 
added her shrieks to the general clamor. 

For two or three minutes it looked like a riot 
or a murder or both. But, fortunately for the 
discomfited Frenchmen, saner heads took hold of 
the situation. The hot-headed native who had 
forgotten himself was escorted none too gently 
from the estaminet, to be persuaded verbally, but 
effectively, of the error of his ways in a less pub- 
lic spot. 

The old proprietress apologized to us in her 
most elegant and effusive English, and then the 
meeting broke up. We were momentarily too 
disgusted to continue to enjoy French hospitality. 

Do not misunderstand me. We Tommies like 
the French, we thoroughly love them, but occa- 
sionally one of these fiery Frenchmen, brooding 
over multitudinous hardships, will burst loose, 



86 *^ LADIES FROM HELL'' 

and, although his eruption is harmless enough to 
us of more stoical English stock who understand, 
each such outburst leaves a temporary wound. 
But in a few hours our anger wears off, and we 
laugh the matter down and forget it, along with 
the rest of our manifold troubles of trenchdom. 

On returning to the billet that evening, word 
was passed around that there was a spy in our 
midst, who had been active in obtaining informa- 
tion and in forwarding it with remarkable de- 
spatch to the German lines. 

Suspicion had been directed to a workman in 
one of the adjoining fields. Innocent enough 
he seemed, to all outward appearances, — short, 
stocky, dressed in blue jeans about ten sizes too 
big for him. To the casual observer he was a 
hard-working French peasant, and naught else. 
There was, however, something a little unusual 
about him. It was perfectly natural that a 
Frenchman should take some interest in our go- 
ings and comings, but there is a point at which 
legitimate interest stops, and this man in the blue 
jeans had exceeded these bounds of decent curi- 
osity. Each morning as we went out on route 
marches, regardless of the hour or weather, we 
observed him out there digging in the field, always 
digging. Apparently this gentleman belonged to 
the Night Owl fraternity, for he was up long be- 



THE MAN IN THE BLUE JEANS 87 

fore the larks and retired but very little before 
moon-up. 

Such diligence, even for a French peasant, is 
remarkable. Even so, he might have passed with- 
out exciting suspicion, had he not on one occasion 
been observed to pull out a pair of binoculars 
from the depths of his jeans and scan the horizon 
and the varied actions of our troops. 

Now, binoculars are not generally found on 
French peasants. Neither does a French peasant 
habitually use chance binoculars industriously, 
and then jot down notes in a little book. Yet the 
man in the blue jeans had been observed engaged 
in both of these unusual pastimes. 

Obviously, the case required diplomatic han- 
dling. In the first place, there was danger of 
hurting the peasant's feelings, should he prove to 
be but an innocent observer who by sheer chance 
had come into possession of a pair of binoculars. 
As you can guess, the feelings of a Frenchman 
are somewhat easily injured, especially by false 
suspicions of loyalty, and, as we had informal 
orders to keep on the sunny side of the French 
people, both collectively and individually, our com- 
manding officer desired that the man in the blue 
jeans be given the most cordial treatment possible 
under the circumstances. 

Sergeant McFarland, who was something of a 



88 * ^LADIES FROM HELL'' 

linguist and particularly adept at the French lan- 
guage, was appointed Sherlock Holmes of the oc- 
casion. Promptly at six o'clock in the morning, 
he walked leisurely down the road which ran 
alongside the field in which the peasant worked. 
The sergeant's air was one of great unconcern. 
To all outward appearances he might have been 
a gentleman out for a stroll, viewing his estate. 

From the neighboring bushes we watched his 
progress. Quite casually he observed the peas- 
ant, and engaged him in idle conversation. The 
weather was thoroughly covered. Past, present, 
and future battles were discussed, all quite cas- 
ually, of course, and then we observed the two 
walking down the road together toward battalion 
headquarters. Later we found that our sergeant 
had invited the peasant to have a neighborly 
drink with him at the estaminet. 

It had been arranged that if both of them 
walked by headquarters, real suspicions had been 
fastened upon the peasant and he was to be quietly 
nabbed on his arrival. In order to make the kid- 
napping as genteel as possible, the sergeant in- 
vited him to step into headquarters, but the peas- 
ant was wise beyond his day and age, and pro- 
tested vehemently. 

Immediately a couple of our boys, who had been 
waiting for just such a protest, carried him in 



THE MAN IN THE BLUE JEANS 89 

bodily, and he was immediately quizzed in regard 
to his past, present, and probable future. 

It was found that he was a Frenchman all right, 
but for a long period had been in the employ of 
the Wilhelmstrasse. He was of German-French 
parentage, born in Alsace of a German father and 
a French mother. Of course, under these circum- 
stances, the German parentage predominated, and 
the subtle doctrines of the kaiser had been incul- 
cated in him from his earliest youth, until now, 
half French though he was, he was a willing 
worker for that great fetish of all Germans, der 
Vaterland. Pending further investigation, this 
Germanized native of Alsace was sent back under 
escort to divisional headquarters. 

The following day the field in which he had been 
so industriously digging for several weeks was 
thoroughly searched, and in a little straw-pile near 
a stable, a complete heliograph outfit was dis- 
covered. With this he had been relaying his in- 
formation to a German observation balloon not 
many miles away. 

After observing the action taken by your coun- 
try under somewhat similar circumstances, I am 
led to believe that had this man been caught in 
the same act on the parade ground of West Point, 
he would have been interned as a dangerous char- 
acter. But over there in France, where the bodies 



90 ** LADIES FROM HELL" 

of civilized humanity are pushing the daisies up, 
there is no room for dangerous characters. Over 
there you are either for us, or you are against us. 
There is no neutral ground. You cannot be dan- 
gerous and live. In fact, it is wiser not to be 
even suspected of dangerous inclinations. 

Circumstantial though the evidence against this 
spy may have been, the Flanders front had little 
shrift for him, and a few mornings later his back 
was against a stone wall and the firing squad 
was in front. 

In and about this little village we rested for 
four days, and much rivalry was provoked by the 
village beauty. Every village in France, you 
know, has its ** beauty." When the number of 
soldiers sufficiently outweighs the number of girls, 
every girl becomes a recognized village beauty. 
But in this particular instance there was one 
lassie who so far outshone the others that she 
was unanimously accepted as the logical Queen 
of the May. 

I remember her well. She was tall and dark, 
with the sparkling eyes and beautiful carriage of 
the typical young French peasant girl. 

Hardly had we been in the village an hour be- 
fore discussion was rife as to who would be her 
escort for the period of our stay. There was a 
great deal of good-natured skirmishing for her 



THE MAN IN THE BLUE JEANS 91 

smiles; in fact, the neighboring estaminet was 
well-nigh forsaken in favor of this fair damsePs 
dwelling. She was running no estaminet, but it 
was remarkable how many soldiers found her 
farm-house much cooler and more attractive than 
the established estaminet a few rods farther 
down the street. I think before the day was over 
the entire platoon had called, quite informally, 
of course, at her home and begged for a cup of 
coffee, some bread and butter, or for almost any- 
thing that would give an excuse to linger in her 
presence. The prices which she received for such 
small favors would make your Mr. Hoover wail 
with anguish. 

I myself was one of the aspirants for this fair 
maid's affections, and, thinking to steal a march 
on the rest of the platoon, I went over there at 
dusk one night, with a very definite plan worked 
out for gaining her company during the balance 
of the evening. By devious paths I arrived at 
her farm, and was just going around the barn 
when I ran into and nearly knocked over an 
officer, engaged'in a similar flank attack from the 
rear. 

Evening is the favorite time with officers for 
affairs of the heart. The reasons are obvious. 
An officer is not popularly supposed to be prone 
to such airy fancies. Some of them feel that it 



92 *^ LADIES FROM HELL'' 

would lower them in the estimation of their men, 
were they to be so much as suspected of playing 
the gay Lothario. Hence, from the standpoint of 
safety, as well as for the romantic glamour which 
sifts down of an evening, it is in this dusky sea- 
son that the young officer of the army must do 
his billing and cooing. 

Knowing this full well, I required no engraved 
invitation from the officer to retire. This I did in 
bad order, and the officer, by force of superior 
authority, became the acknowledged escort of the 
lady fair throughout the balance of our stay. 

From this village we went to Givenchy. You 
have heard long before this, perhaps, of the fa- 
mous brick-fields of Givenchy. A few days before 
our arrival these brick-fields had been the scene 
of a bloody battle in which three of our regiments 
had been engaged. 

The brick-fields, or kilns, were arranged in long 
rows twenty or thirty yards apart. It took our 
forces an entire day to capture the first line of 
kilns, and the better part of a week was consumed 
in cleaning the Germans out of the vicinity. It 
was in this locality that we were to stay until the 
new draft arrived from England to fill our ranks, 
depleted by the catastrophe before Lille. 

As we marched up, the men whom we were to 
relieve were just returning from the front-line 



THE MAN IN THE BLUE JEANS 93 

trenches, and, during a brief halt, we had an 
opportunity to exchange the time of day with 
them. 

I well remember talking with one young chap 
who had seen his first action at these brick-kilns, 
and I asked him how things were going. He 
said: 

**To be truthful, it 's hell up there. I never 
realized the awfulness of war before, and do you 
know, I don 't mind the fighting a bit ; it is before 
and after the fighting that hurts. Before the 
fighting you are waiting to be shot, and after 
the fighting you are waiting to bring in the fel- 
lows who were shot, and you hear and see them 
all about you. Give me fighting every time, but 
let me skip before and after. ' ' 

Givenchy was just a little hamlet, with few 
points of interest aside from the brick-fields and 
the remains of a house which had served both 
Germans and French as headquarters when the 
battle-lines swayed back and forth. 

I, along with several other curiosity-seekers, 
went over to the ruins of the chateau. It was an 
immense place, the center of a vast French es- 
tate. Even yet, about the courtyard and garden, 
were the remains of trenches and many gruesome 
relics of the hand-to-hand fighting that had taken 
place there. One-half of the house and a liberal 



94 * ^LADIES FROM HELL'' 

portion of the adjoining territory were nothing 
but a tremendous hole half -filled with greenish 
water and debris, — the work of a French mine. 

Mining is one of the most hazardous occupations 
carried on in trenchland. England is fortunate in 
having a tremendous source of supply in her 
Welsh coal-miners. These men are extremely 
quick, and are daring to the point of rashness. 

The mines, or ** saps'' as they are commonly 
called, are tunneled fifty to tv^o hundred yards. 
Speed is a necessary requisite in this work. The 
dirt is carried away on little tramcars far enough 
back so that suspicion will not be excited on the 
opposing side. The saps are of varied size. 
Some are only large enough to crawl into, while 
others are four or five feet high. In mining the 
English have very much the edge on the Ger- 
mans. The Welsh miners work with almost in- 
credible swiftness, scratching ahead like dogs in 
a burrow. They seem to have an intuitive knowl- 
edge of direction and the general nature of the 
ground through which they are digging. This 
last is important, because to strike a stone with 
a pick may disclose the progress of operations 
to a German listening, his ear to the ground, in a 
fire-trench or similar sap not many yards away. 

These miners work in shifts, much as they do 
back under the sea at the tip end of England. 



THE MAN IN THE BLUE JEANS 95 

The mining of Messines Eidge bears ample tes- 
timony to their expertness. When a mine is ex- 
ploded, the earth belches up skj^ward in a great 
wave. You have doubtless seen pictures of a na- 
val battle, and you will remember the action of 
the water when it is struck by a shell. Under 
the urge of a high-explosive mine, solid earth 
and rock behave in much the same manner. You 
can literally see the edges of the earth bend and 
rush upward into the air. Then, all about the 
fringe of dirt and smoke, you see the heavier 
objects dropping down. 

In the mining of the chateau it was a race 
against time, as both the Germans and French 
were mining, the Frenchmen under the Germans. 
The French got there first, and as their mine 
leaped up into the air report has it that upward 
of two thousand German reserves, who had just 
come up from their billets, went west. 

The region about Givenchy had formerly been 
a mining district, and the fields were bare, except 
for the houses, wrecks of which cluttered the bat- 
tle-line for many miles on each side. To our right 
was the shaft-head of a coal mine slightly behind 
our lines, and the Germans shelled this constantly 
to prevent our working it. It was here that I had 
my first experience with the German minenwerfer, 
as they ponderously called it. Quick-witted 



96 ^^ LADIES FEOM HELL^' 

Tommy long ago dubbed this particular shell, 
* ^ Minnie. ' ' It is about as nasty a thing as I ever 
had to deal with. The shells that whistle high 
above your head are directed at the artillery be- 
hind the lines, and they worry you not at all. But 
** Minnie,'' which Fritz shoots from his trench- 
mortar, is an exceedingly nasty lady. It is a 
large shell that explodes with a tremendous noise 
and concussion. I have known men to be killed 
outright by the concussion alone. The shells trun- 
dle through the air, and you can actually see 
them coming. This gives you time to dodge down 
into a dugout. But familiarity always breeds 
contempt, and we boys, after a few days' acquaint- 
ance with them, took to shooting at these ** Min- 
nies," much as though they were clay pigeons. 

Such familiarity should not be taken to indi- 
cate the ineffectiveness of the minenwerfer. 
When one of them lands correctly, which is not 
very frequently, it means a tremendous lot of pick- 
and-shovel work for several hours. Where a 
** Minnie" hits, the landscape is badly shattered, 
and a big gap in the trench and parapet must be 
filled in double-quick time. 

We had been at Given chy but a few hours when 
the new draft of four hundred and fifty men from 
England, fresh from a training camp, came up 
to fill the pitiful gaps in our ranks. With the 



THE MAN IN THE BLUE JEANS 97 

new draft came new friends, and old friends, too. 

Home! How good it seemed to hear from it 
again! We were like boys returning to school 
after a vacation, and we swapped stories of home- 
and trench-life unceasingly, just as those other 
veterans, many of whom were now dead, had 
swapped these same stories with us upon our ar- 
rival not many months before. 

As luck would have it, a chap whom I had 
known back home came with this draft. He told 
me that he had almost given up hope of ever 
reaching the firing-line, owing to his lack of skill 
with a rifle. Three times he had been turned 
down for poor musketry, and he rejoiced at his 
arrival in trenchdom as though it were a long- 
postponed theater party. 

Under the spell of the trenches friendships were 
quickly made, and such friendships bring with 
them a far deeper and truer fellowship than any 
friendship formed under less trying circum- 
stances. There is remarkably little discord either 
in the trenches or behind the lines. Fellowship 
reigns supreme. Of course we have our little 
squabbles, but they are squabbles and nothing 
more. There is endless bantering, but when the 
chaffing reaches too white a heat for comfort, more 
sober heads interpose and stop the gathering 
storm before it becomes unmanageable. 



98 '^LADIES FROM HELL'' 

After a day or two of rest we advanced to the 
firing line in the cool of evening. It was a short, 
uphill walk. Lights were out, there was no talk- 
ing, and we had strict orders to guard against 
any clinking of accoutrements. Reserves coming 
up are a pet bulPs-eye for the Teuton artillery, 
and the utmost secrecy and quiet must be main- 
tained for safe-conduct. At five hundred yards, 
on a quiet night, the noise of one bayonet striking 
against another may mean the beginning of a bat- 
tle. Under such circumstances the carelessness 
of a pal, however slight, becomes a crime of tre- 
mendous proportions. Your nerves are all atin- 
gle. You almost fear to breathe. 

That night I had my first spell at listening-post 
duty. In this sector we had three listening-posts 
about one hundred yards apart. The first ex- 
tended out to within seventy-five yards of the Ger- 
man trench; the second reached to within fifty 
yards ; and the third was separated from the hun- 
gry hand of the Hun by scarcely more than thirty 
yards. 

It was to this third post that I was ordered. 
Listening-post duty, especially in an advanced po- 
sition such as mine, is no sinecure. There is some 
comfort in being in a trench and knowing that 
you have full permission to fire whenever the 
spirit so moves, but out in an advanced listening- 



THE MAN IN THE BLUE JEANS 99 

post you have strict and absolute orders to fire 
under no circumstances whatsoever. 

There are two men in such a position. One 
keeps watch, while the other stands ready to run 
back with any news of an impending attack. My 
particular listening-post was far out beyond our 
own barbed wire, and was supposed to be con- 
cealed. Without exerting myself in the least, I 
could hear the Germans talking in their trench. 
It rather amused me that night, the way the pa- 
trols came up every hour to see that we were on 
the job and not asleep. I couldn't have slept if 
my life had hung upon it. 

It was a new sector, and in no-man's-land there 
still remained a patch of grass here and there 
and a few ghostlike stalks of waving wheat. Fifty 
times that night I identified one of these stalks as 
the advancing German army. I had **Boche 
fever,'' and I had it right. It really was n't my 
fault either, because a certain fresh corporal had 
told me in great confidence that same evening 
how he had it on good authority that the Germans 
were going to come over at eleven o'clock. 

Eleven o'clock was my turn to watch and the 
other fellow's to run back, in case the Germans 
should come. At such a time, of the two horns 
of the dilemma, the chap who runs back has the 
best horn. The one who stays in the advance 



100 ''LADIES FROM HELL'' 

listening-post has 999 chances to 1 of being put 
on intimate terms with a German bomb or bay- 
onet. As he is forbidden to fire, no matter what 
the price of silence, all he can do is to stand his 
ground and trust that the Germans will overlook 
him. The Huns, however, are very thorough, and 
seldom are they guilty of such errors of omission. 

With this story of impending attack churning in 
my head, you can imagine my sensations as I took 
my turn and watched my timepiece tick away the 
hours from eleven o'clock on. But my promised 
Teuton advance did not materialize, and the cold 
sweat dried in the chill breeze of morning. 

At three o'clock every one ** stands to." That 
is, at this hour every one must be up on the firing- 
step ready for action, with rifle loaded, safety- 
catch thrown back, and bayonet in place. Three 
o'clock in the morning has a neck-and-neck race 
with dusk as the popular moment for German 
attacks, and cruel experience has taught the Al- 
lied armies to be ready at this hour. 

The next day came rumors of a proposed trench 
raid. Trench raids are one means of obtaining 
information in regard to opposing forces. The 
raiders sneak out from a sap-head or advance 
listening-post and, if possible without being dis- 
covered, endeavor to jump into a section of the 
opposite trench and drag a luckless Fritz or two 



THE MAN IN THE BLUE JEANS 101 

back to their own lines. The object of this game 
is to win without firing a shot. So far as I know 
this object has never been attained. Either going 
or coming or in the middle of the raid you are 
discovered and, as a result, trench raids are a 
prolific source of casualties. 

Service in such a raid is usually a matter of 
volunteering, and that evening, when volunteers 
were called for, I stepped forward and was chosen, 
along with fifty-two other chaps who were anxious 
to experience the zenith of trench excitement. 

It was a deucedly rotten night. A nasty, cold 
drizzle had settled down, and everything was 
afloat. The tall, dank grass between our lines and 
the German trenches was wetter than the rain it- 
self. Occasionally a flare forced its way up 
through the mist, but it gave little light, owing 
to the vapor in the atmosphere. On the preced- 
ing night our patrols had been out and had cut 
a lane through the German barbed wire that would 
permit us to go forward about four abreast. 

Since quiet in going, coming, and execution of a 
raid is essential, few firearms were taken along. 
Our decorations that evening consisted largely 
of long, ugly trench-knives and ** knuckle-dusters'' 
or ** brass knuckles'' as they are known in the 
parlance of the second-story man. 

Before setting out we were stripped of all marks 



102 '* LADIES FROM HELL'' 

of identification, sucli as regimental insignia, etc., 
so that the capture of any of us might not disclose 
information of value to the enemy. 

While the trenches at this point were within 
seventy-five yards of each other, we took a diag- 
onal course from one of the sap-heads and had 
about one hundred yards to go across no-man's- 
land. Our objective was a German sap-head at 
which was posted a machine-gun. It was our priv- 
ilege to enter this sap-head, capture the occupants, 
and bring them back, along with their machine- 
gun and, incidentally, ourselves. The prisoners 
were to be brought back alive, if possible, that 
they might be subjected to the ** third degree" and 
any and all information in regard to the opposing 
forces wrung from them. 

A code of signals had been arranged, so that 
our progress might be intelligently guided by the 
officer in command. Such signals consist of taps 
on the ground. The commanding officer is in the 
center. One tap means **go forward." This is 
passed down each side of the line until it reaches 
the end. It is then passed back. When the offi- 
cer hears the tap come back, he knows that all 
are fully informed of the movement. Two taps 
mean ^^halt after fifty paces," and three taps 
mean * * go at them. ' ' 

Half way across we halted for a final adjust- 



THE MAN IN THE BLUE JEANS 103 

ment of our line, and then prepared to rush the 
trench. 

The machine-gun implacement was just behind 
the German barbed wire entanglement and ex- 
tended out from the Teuton line proper about 
thirty-five yards. As we reached the breach in 
the barbed wire we halted, took a deep breath, and 
at a given signal rushed forward as quietly as 
haste would permit. Dividing to the left and 
right, some of us jumped into the trench midway 
between the implacement and the German line. 
Others jumped into the implacement itself. Here 
we found three Germans. One of them was bay- 
oneted, being too unruly for convenient capture. 
The other two were dragged back without cere- 
mony to our own lines. Concerning the action at 
the machine-gun implacement I know little, for I 
was one of ten who jumped into the sap in order 
to prevent the German lines from sending assist- 
ance to their men at the sap-head. 

Of course the raid was overheard in the quiet 
of the evening, and no sooner had the first shot 
been fired than all of no-man's-land became a liv- 
ing hell of bullets and almost as bright as day with 
a multitude of flares from the German trenches. 

I vaguely remember two Germans — ^the trenches 
permit but two men to advance abreast — rushing 
down upon us two Scottish, who stood between the 



104 *' LADIES FROM HELL'' 

Germans and their friends at the machine-gun 
implacement. We did not know what was going 
on behind us. It was our duty to fend off all rein- 
forcements from the firing line. I braced myself 
for the shock of attack. Somebody threw a bomb, 
and the blackness in front of me collapsed and 
sank down. Behind him came a towering mass 
of onrushing, helmeted forms — myriads of them, 
apparently — and I lunged forward blindly with 
my bayonet. 

If I should describe the action of the next two 
minutes, I would be lying, because I do not know 
exactly what did happen. I remember lunging 
repeatedly, missing sometimes and sometimes not. 
There was no room or time for conscious parry- 
ing, but when the signal came for us to retreat the 
four of us who survived the action in the sap- 
trench sprang over the edge and crawled back 
for our trenches, like snakes bound for their holes 
at the break of day. 

On our return we found our objective had been 
gained — two German prisoners were there, big as 
life. But they proved expensive luxuries, for 
of the fifty-three who went out on this trench raid, 
only nine returned. Some thirty-five had been 
wounded or killed, and the others had been cap- 
tured. Five or six of the boys lay out in no- 



THE MAN IN THE BLUE JEANS 105 

man ^3-land for twenty-four hours before our 
stretcher-bearers could reach them. 

Yet with all its dangers a trench raid has a rare 
element of excitement. The danger comes not so 
much in the raid itself, as on the return journey. 
In going over and in the actual attack you have 
the element of surprise in your favor. Fritz in 
his sap-head may be dozing. At best, he is far 
outnumbered. The moments of real action are 
few and short. In fact, the entire raid from 
start to finish does not consume more than two 
or three minutes, but it is two or three minutes 
of the most intense fighting, where individual 
initiative comes in for its own and just reward. 

I imagine that your American troops will be 
particularly successful at trench-raid work. I am 
sure that they will far outshine Fritz, who is a 
methodical being as a rule and little given to in- 
dividual thought, apparently. When he has or- 
ders to guide him, he runs like some automaton; 
he is uncanny. But in trench raids, when it is 
man for man and the devil take the hindmost, 
Fritz is rather stunned by the suddenness of it all 
and is more than likely to be captured without 
much show of resistance, in which, perhaps, he is 
wise. 



CHAPTER V 

MR. FINDLEY's grave — TRENCH LIFE — NICHOLS GOES 

WEST 

VERY shortly our battalion was ordered back 
to Bethune. 

We set off late one night and covered the twelve 
kilometers by early dawn of the following day. 
There we found the billets to which we had been 
assigned were chock full of sleeping soldiery. 
Our commanding officer and the officer in charge 
of the billet exchanged numerous uncomplimen- 
tary remarks as a result of the mixup. But in 
war, as in peace, possession is nine points of the 
law, and we had to seek other billets elsewhere. 

By the best of good fortune we located one of 
those old French barns which are two or three 
times as large as the barn with which you are 
familiar. The floors are tile, and along the sides 
are great beams covered with hay. These hay- 
covered beams are at a premium among the boys, 
and the first-comers invariably clamber up to 
them and usurp them for their own. 

Little time was spent in sleeping, however, for 

106 



MR. FINDLEY^S GRAVE 107 

we were once more near to civilization. Accom- 
panied by six or eight of my comrades, I drew 
what pay was coming to me and went into Bethune 
proper, where my $2.50 quickly disappeared into 
the outstretched hands of the genial French popu- 
lace. 

After a brief but cheering hour of fellowship at 
an estaminet, we started across town with the 
avowed intention of finding Mr. Findley's grave. 
The last we had seen of Mr. Findley had been 
at the battle for Lille. We knew that he had been 
buried in the military cemetery at Bethune. Fol- 
lowing directions, we went through the town and 
out on the far side, where in the distance we saw 
the civilian cemetery stretching out before us. 

The old caretaker at the gate examined us se- 
verely, but after much gesticulation our mission 
was explained to him, and he swung back the 
heavy bronze gateway as though it were a duty 
second only in importance to that of the Premier. 

This was my first sight of a French cemetery, 
and I was struck with the simple, unpretentious 
manner in which the French decorate the graves 
of their dead. Humble little marble crosses were 
everywhere. Occasionally a more pretentious 
vault loomed up. Pictures of Christ were all 
about. On the more humble graves were bouquets 
of waxed flowers under glass cases. 



108 ^^ LADIES FROM HELL'' 

Through this depressing scene we strode, real- 
izing full well how our costumes jangled with the 
peaceful surroundings. On the far side the mili- 
tary cemetery adjoined the civilian cemetery. 
There was no mistaking it, for, as we came to 
the edge of the formal civilian plot, God's mili- 
tary acre stretched out before us on either side 
as far as the eye could reach, mute testimony to 
the efficiency of kultur. 

The military cemetery was a sharp contrast to 
the civilian resting-place we had left behind us. 
Row on row of plain deal crosses swept away into 
the distance and over the slight rise of ground, 
apparently endlessly. 

To our right were a number of rows of newly- 
dug graves. To the reader not familiar with 
war, or unhardened to its practical side, the 
method of burying even our honored dead will 
come with something of a shock. Very few of 
them have a single grave. Instead, long trenches 
are dug, the sides stepping up like mammoth 
steps on the Pyramids of Egypt. In the lowest 
trench rests a single rough casket; on top of it 
and on each side, on the next higher step, are 
other caskets ; and so on upward until the trench 
is filled. 

In quiet times, when there is little fighting, these 
trenches are dug in preparation for the sterner 



MR. FINDLEY'S GRAVE 109 

days to come, and you will always see the ends of 
a pile of rough boxes jutting out into daylight, 
awaiting new arrivals before the earth is thrown 
over them. 

Yet in all its immensity this cemetery repre- 
sented only a fraction of our Allied dead. It is 
only those who reach the hospital to die who are 
formally buried in such a cemetery. Those who 
are fortunate, or unfortunate, enough to die a 
sudden death out in no-man's-land, or in trench- 
land, are hastily buried in a shallow scooped-out 
grave hard by, and lucky, indeed, are they if so 
much as a plain cross decorates their last resting- 
place. 

It was down row after row of these polygamous 
graves that we strode, hunting for that little cross 
which would mark the grave of our Mr. Findley. 
We knew that we would recognize it, for we had 
been told that it was set apart from its fellows 
by the red Saint Andrew's Cross of Scotland. 
And so at last we came upon it. 

At such moments nothing is said and nothing 
is done. Man and life and all life 's petty vicissi- 
tudes become as little things in the face of the 
grim reaper. About Mr. Findley 's grave we 
stood, hatless and wordless, silent tributes to this 
great Christian of war's making and to the cause 
for which he fought and gave his all. 



110 *^ LADIES FROM HELL'' 

Then, instinctively, we bent and each gathered 
a handful of pebbles. With them we outlined 
the approximate boundaries of Mr. Findley's 
grave, not knowing then whether he rested di- 
rectly underneath or two or three layers down. 
But it seemed only right that a man who had 
given so much, both in life and in death, should 
have his grave set apart, if only by a little, from 
those surrounding him. 

We finished our work of reverence and de- 
parted, walking silently through the military cem- 
etery and then on through the civilian cemetery 
by which we had entered. As we passed, we 
met a company of French women. There were 
five of them. One was evidently the mother, while 
the others may have been her daughters or near 
of kin. They were of the peasant class, roughly 
dressed, with wooden sabots. The old mother 
cried incessantly, while the younger women busied 
themselves nervously in decorating one of the 
graves with the simple offerings afforded by their 
scanty income. An ordinary little jam-pot was 
upturned. Within it was an inscription, scrib- 
bled, perhaps, by the village padre, awaiting only 
the time when the family's savings would be suf- 
ficient to warrant a more pretentious record of 
their loved one's life and death. 

And over it all, like the bass notes of a great 



MR. FINDLEY^S GRAVE 111 

organ, played the roar of distant gun-fire, an 
incessant salute to those who had gone on never 
to return. 

Saddened by our grim mission of the afternoon, 
we felt in need of another visit to an estaminet 
on our return journey. By pooling our resources 
we managed to collect sufficient funds for a brief, 
a very brief, stay. One of the boys, who was 
more familiar with the estaminets of Bethune 
than the rest of us, led the way to one where 
he assured us the most beautiful woman in France 
waited on table. In my estimation his judgment 
was nearly correct, but, after all, when you have 
been in the trenches for three or four weeks, a 
feminine face takes on a charm never seen in 
civilian life. Unquestionably, however, this little 
waitress was of no ordinary clay. She was a 
petite little thing, fully experienced in the proper 
handling of British soldiery. Though we had but 
little, we spent our last cent. If we had had ten 
times as much, she and her wily ways would have 
won it all from us just as easily. 

I am in much accord with Mark Twain, who 
says that the French do not understand their own 
language. Certainly, in ordering a meal the 
French have no more idea of what we Britishers 
desire than have we of the proper word to de- 
scribe it. The usual order at a French estaminet 



112 *^ LADIES FROM HELL'» 

is the French for * * four-egg omelet. ' ' This pref- 
erence for omelets, and particularly for a **four- 
egg omelet," will be understood when I tell you 
that the French phrase sounds much like ** omelet 
with a cat roof.'' When all else fails, by a sim- 
ple process of memory ** omelet with a cat roof 
brings the desired results. Hence it has become 
the standard meal of the British soldier seeking 
a change of diet at a French estaminet. 

While returning to the billet we met a com- 
pany of troops coming from the living hell at 
Ypres. Like all troops, they were ** grousing" 
and complaining about everything, from the stars 
above to the earth beneath. They were leaving 
the hottest part of the line for one of the more 
quiet sections. This they felt to be ample cause 
for complaint. I do not know, but probably their 
rations had been unusually good, their officers 
unusually considerate, and the mail service from 
home unusually liberal; hence nothing remained 
worth complaining about except this very satis- 
factory transfer. They made the most of it. 

Immediately upon our return to Bethune that 
afternoon our battalion was transferred to a posi- 
tion nearer the firing-line. As we marched out of 
the town the last bakery shop was bought out of 
all supplies, and we marched on, laden down 



MR. FINDLEY^S GRAVE 113 

equally with equipment and delicacies of French 
concoction. 

It may seem odd to you that we could spend all 
our money at a French estaminet and yet have 
more for the luxury of a French bakery. This 
is easily understood when I explain that one sol- 
dier's credit on leaving a town is perfectly good 
for another. Neither may ever return, and hence 
money on the way up to the firing-line is one of 
the most valueless of all possessions. When 
leaving the firing-line, however, and when ap- 
proaching a town, money takes on added stature 
and girth. It so happened that we were leaving 
the luxuries of life for the stern realities of the 
trench, and those with money about them found 
it valueless, since there was nothing on which 
to spend it. Therefore they much preferred to 
lend it and thereby provide for a rainy day to 
come, — should that day ever arrive. 

Up to the extreme right of the British line we 
went, replacing a number of French troops who 
had been withdrawn in preparation for a drive in 
the Champagne district, a prelude to the Battle 
of Champagne and later to Verdun. 

It was now dark as the proverbial coal-hole. 
About a mile or a mile and a half back of the line 
proper we entered the connnunication trench, and 



114 ** LADIES FROM HELL'' 

for seemingly endless hours we tramped on, turn 
after turn, endlessly and always. A mile and 
a half as the crow flies is likely to be three miles 
or more in a communication trench. 

Coming back all the time were men laden down 
with this or that, and others were going to relieve 
them or to replace them, for no man can leave the 
front line without another coming to take his 
place. The front line must always be filled. 

As we drew nearer and nearer, occasional flares 
which shot up higher than their brothers gave 
us a vague hint of our general direction, but when 
they went out the night seemed blacker than 
before, and east and west and north and south 
became mere figures of speech. Under a huge 
chateau we went, like New Yorkers on their way 
to work. Here the trench branched out to the left 
and to the right, and, owing to the darkness, part 
of our battalion lost touch with the balance and 
wound its way down the left-hand trench. 

We did not discover this until we were almost 
at the front line, when we had to return and find 
our lost brethren. We located them swearing 
away in the left-hand trench, which, after endless 
plodding, they had discovered to be a blind alley. 

Fifty yards from the front line we encountered 
the French regiment returning. No more foreign- 
looking body of men have I ever seen. They were 



MR. FINDLEY'S GRAVE 115 

laden down with odd-shaped packs that, in the 
darkness, gave them a wholly unnatural size and 
shape. Their excitement over leaving the danger 
zone was childlike; their impetuosity was in 
marked contrast to the stolid advance of us Brit- 
ishers. We were perfectly content to be hemmed 
in by trench-walls ; but not so the Frenchmen. As 
each turn in the trench was reached, a dozen or 
more of them would explode with impatience and 
bound up to the top of the trench, to run across 
the open country unimpeded on their homeward 
path. 

Our officers had been up to this trench the day 
before and were thoroughly familiar with it and 
its contour. Before leaving we had been informed 
of our individual duties and of the general lay 
of the land. Hence, on entering this strange 
trench, we were comparatively at home and 
quickly settled down into the ordinary routine of 
trench-life. 

The line was quiet at this time. By ** quiet ^' I 
mean that there was no particular ** drive'' going 
on. Of course the Germans have a hatred for ab- 
solute quiet, and so, at carefully predetermined 
occasions, they send over their ** coal-boxes " and 
their ** Jack Johnsons,'' with an occasional minen- 
werfer to punctuate the silence. At hours estab- 
lished in their code of battle they tune up their 



116 ** LADIES FROM HELL'' 

**Hymn of Hate/' but generally this is directed 
more at the batteries in the rear than at the front 
line. After weeks of familiarity with the German 
brand of hate, it becomes nothing more than a 
method of setting one's watch, so regular is it in 
its appearance. 

One night, shortly after dusk, a despatch-rider 
wound his way up through the trench and came 
running to the dugout of the 0. C. The arrival 
of a despatch-rider is not an everyday occurrence, 
and his appearance usually forms the basis for a 
tremendous amount of discussion and conjecture 
as to the possible contents of his message. 

So it was to-night. The 0. C. took the envelope 
from him, read the despatch hastily, and imme- 
diately the news spread down the trench that Italy 
had entered the war and had already mobilized 
and taken the field. 

This news was received with astonishment by 
our troops, for you must understand that the man 
in the trenches knows little that is going on, ex- 
cept within a radius of two or three hundred 
yards. National politics, international intrigues, 
and the events of which you read, are ancient his- 
tory before he ever hears of them. Oftentimes he 
will receive papers, but always they are three to 
six days old, and in these stirring times a three- 
day-old newspaper is as ancient as the Book of 



MR. FINDLEY^S GRAVE 117 

Exodus. When boundary lines change overnight, 
when history is being written with every passing 
moment, even a **last edition'' is likely to be 
moldy. Hence it is not to be wondered at that 
the entrance of Italy into the lists came as a 
distinct surprise, but none the less a welcome 
one. 

Such an unusual event was reckoned worthy of 
a fitting celebration. Much discussion ensued as 
to the proper method of signaling the arrival of 
so gallant an ally. By a burst of inspiration our 
commanding ofiScer suggested that the Boches be 
appraised of their newest enemy through the med- 
ium of three rounds of rapid fire and three cheers, 
followed by an immediate plunge for the nearest 
dugout on the part of the celebrants. 

This suggestion received the unanimous ap- 
proval of the entire battalion, and forthwith three 
rounds of lead and three rounds of cheers were 
sent over with equal enthusiasm and despatch. 
The idea was accepted as a standard method of 
celebration throughout the line, and from the far 
right of the British line on across France and Bel- 
gium three mighty cheers rang out as a welcome 
to Italy. 

Such exuberance from British troops was diag- 
nosed by the Germans as a preliminary to an at- 
tack, and we had hardly made the dugouts when 



118 '^LADIES FEOM HELL'' 

the roar of German machine-guns echoed our 
cheers to the horizon. 

Perhaps at this point I might dispel one or two 
illusions which apparently exist in minds not fa- 
miliar with life in trenchdom. You hear a great 
deal about a man being **on'' for one hour and 
**off for four. **0n'' means that he is **on 
watch," while ^*o£f means that he is off watch 
but on the job. There are no union hours in the 
front line or behind it. While your mechanics are 
arguing over the necessity for an eight-hour day ; 
while the I. W. W. are striking and rioting to gain 
themselves a softer seat or a more comfortable 
job; while Nihilists and Reds of more attractive 
name, but equally traitorous desires, are holding 
long meetings and giving vent to windy speeches, 
your man in the front line is working twenty-four 
hours a day, and the only thing that keeps him 
from working longer is the arrival of another day. 

Sleep in the front line is a fictitious quantity. 
There is no such thing. When there are no ra- 
tions to be carried, there are bombs to be carried ; 
when there are no bombs required, ammunition for 
the omnivorous machine-guns is urgently neces- 
sary; when the machine-gun has its pantry full, 
there are sand-bags to be filled or communication 
trenches to be dug. The man in the front line has 
neither sleep nor holiday. True, he may drop 



MR. FINDLEY'S GRAVE 119 

down in his tracks for an hour or two, but he does 
not sleep. His eyes are closed, he is unconscious, 
but he does not sleep. Over him always broods 
the possibility of a Hun invasion. His dreams 
are riotous; he fights and dies a hundred times 
during that hour; and he rises only slightly re- 
freshed, only a little more ready to do his **bit,'* 
as some of you please to call it. 

As you review the incessant duties of the front 
line, you will understand why it is that night loses 
its meaning, and day likewise. The stand-to or- 
der at 3 A. M. does not inconvenience as it would 
were you a civilian accustomed to rising at six and 
retiring at ten. There is no conscious day or 
night when you are in the front line. Each day 
is just twenty-four indistinguishable hours of in- 
terminable toil. Is it any wonder, therefore, that 
the soldier returns to his rest-billet to drop down 
absolutely unconscious, blissfully at peace, to 
sleep for twelve or sixteen hours at a stretch 
without so much as moving a muscle 1 

There are no favorites in the front line. It is 
turn and turn about. The battalion roster shows 
a record of each man's duties throughout a period 
of time, and if a man does not volunteer for any 
particular task, he is assigned whatever task may 
arise. A daily chore is the ration fatigue. This 
means bringing up cheese, biscuits, bread, and the 



120 ^* LADIES FROM HELL'' 

nightly jar of rum, or the big ** dixies'' smoking 
with a soup concocted from vegetables, meat, etc. 
There is also the inevitable and much-dreaded jar 
of jam. 

One ration fatigue in which I engaged stands 
out very clearly in my mind, since it was my first 
formal introduction to the German gas attack. 
Gas attacks to-day have lost some of their initial 
horror. We have learned how to deal with them. 
To-day the front line listening-posts are on the 
lookout for such attacks, and when that greenish 
horror — as innocent in appearance as any cloud, 
but as deadly as the fumes of old Vesuvius — ap- 
pears in the foreground, electric-horns blare out 
their warning to the front line, and on back and 
back to ten or fifteen miles behind the trenches. 

Brassiers are also used along the trenches at a 
distance of twenty or thirty yards. The upflung 
current of air from these little fires causes the 
gas to rise and float on and over, without harming 
those underneath. But in the early days of which 
I speak, a gas attack was an unknown quantity. 
Gas shells were a dreaded horror, and gas masks 
were the most rudimentary affairs imaginable. 

We were returning to the front line with our ra- 
tions, and had almost reached our goal, when there 
came the scream of a shell, a blinding flash, and 
then a deafening explosion but a little way ahead 



MR. FINDLEY'S GRAVE 121 

of us. It was fifteen or twenty feet away, I should 
say. Our column of ration-carriers stopped like 
a man who has been hit a solar-plexus blow. I 
saw a few of the fellows up front plunge forward 
or topple over and sink down, as though their 
legs had been made of putty. A sweet, apple- 
cider-like smell wafted its way to my nostrils. At 
first I did not recognize it and took a deeper 
breath. Instantly I felt as though a giant hand 
held my lungs. Gradually these hands tightened, 
and my muscles contracted. I was not suffocat- 
ing for want of air, but for want of strength to 
breathe it. 

I flung down my load of biscuits and grabbed 
my gas mask, made only of a piece of medicated 
cotton and a veil. But it was too late. This 
grim chlorine giant who held my lungs merely 
tightened his grasp, and I bounded to the top of 
the trench and sped away as fast as my legs and 
a reeling earth would let me. Over to the dress- 
ing-station I went, where the medical officer, be- 
tween spells of violent coughing and spitting of 
greenish phlegm, dosed me with a vile licorice 
compound that somewhat eased my intense dis- 
comfort. 

All that night I spent under his care, along with 
three or four other fellows who had likewise man- 
aged to stumble over to the station. Shortly af- 



122 * ^LADIES FEOM HELL'' 

terward four others were brought in. They were 
too far gone to travel without aid. These boys 
brought word that four of the fellows had been 
put out entirely by shell-shock, while six had been 
thoroughly gassed and were even now hovering on 
the brink of death. 

After the immediate effects of the slight gassing 
had worn off, I returned to the front line, but for 
many days thereafter I was intensely weak, and 
my eyesight was badly dimmed. As a rude warn- 
ing against future attacks, we filled bully-beef 
cans with stones and hung them up and down the 
trench, where a watch could shake them and an- 
nounce the approach of any sort of gas attack, be 
it by shell or cloud. 

After our spell of duty in the front line we 
returned to the rest-billets, where the rumble of 
cartwheels told us that the post was arriving. 
The carts were piled mountain high with mail- 
bags such as you use in your country, each marked 
for a certain platoon. Immediately there was ju- 
bilation. The sergeant distributed the parcels 
and letters, and cares and troubles vanished forth- 
with. Cakes, candy, cocoa, coffee, cheese, butter, 
books, magazines, and papers were all forthcom- 
ing, and how welcome they were I Some poor 
chaps, perhaps not such good correspondents as 
the rest of us, were forgotten by the home folks, 




International Film Service Inc. 

After the day's work 
A bagpiper entertaining his comrades behind the lines 



MR. FINDLEY'S GRAVE 123 

and they stole off into lonesome corners to take 
what empty cheer they could from the random 
bits of cake and candy given them by sympathiz- 
ing comrades. 

Let me beseech you never to send a man in the 
fighting line a case of jam, or even a jar of jam. 
Jam and mud are synonymous terms in the minds 
of fighting men. They are fed up on jam. What 
they want is some of this ready-prepared cocoa or 
chocolate to which one need only add hot water. 
Butter is at a premium. Cheese, likewise, is a 
luxury. Sweet biscuits, hard enough to stand the 
rough journey, are rare and welcome delicacies. 
Helmets, trench mirrors, and similar personal ac- 
cessories are always received with open arms. 

The arrival of any packet from home is an event 
of importance, so don ^t forget the boys whom you 
know, when they are on the firing line. The re- 
ceipt of a letter means as much to them as a trip 
to the theater does to you. A package full of deli- 
cacies — well, do you remember what a package 
from home meant to you when you were away at 
school? Multiply that keen joy ten-fold, add to it 
the urgent need for all such things, and you will 
have a vague conception of the good that you are 
doing when you send one of your boys in khaki 
a little package bearing the brief but welcome 
sign, *^Made in the U. S. A.'V 



124 ^^ LADIES FROM HELL" 

Back in the billet our principal duty was the 
digging of sundry communication trenches in and 
about the line. I remember that one nig^it a num- 
ber of us were engaged in digging through an old 
German trench and enlarging it so that it might 
better serve our needs. It was awfully hard 
work, because the straw-thatched dugouts had 
partially fallen in and matted down in a mass that 
was almost shovel-proof. Hence it was no sur- 
prise to me when my pick struck and stuck fast 
in what appeared to be a log. I remember kicking 
away at it, and finally, after loosening it a trifle, 
I leaned over to remove the offending timber. 
Locking my hands firmly around it, I braced my 
feet, gave a giant pull, and tumbled over flat on 
my back. 

But it was no log in which I had imbedded my 
pick, neither was it a log that I held in my hand. 
I had a German's boot, and then some besides. 
The balance of that German was back there under 
the thatched straw. The horribleness of it, plus 
the rotten stench, filled me with an ague, and, to- 
gether with my comrades, I ran back down the 
trench, where we met the sergeant. He grufiQy 
inquired the reason for our haste. We directed 
him to follow his nose to the bend, where the 
reason for our speed would be self-evident. He 



MR. FINDLEY'S GRAVE 125 

did as directed, and shortly returned to order us 
to another part of the line where this most awful 
reality of the battle-field would not obtrude itself 
upon our eyes and nostrils. 

Returning to the billet that night, after five 
hours' steady and fatiguing work, we flung our- 
selves down, tired to the very marrow of our 
bones. The billet was quiet, except for the oc- 
casional snore of a sleeping fighter. Next to me 
lay a man who had been eternally and everlast- 
ingly bragging of his freedom from * ' seam-squir- 
rels,*' as we had come to call the crawlers. This 
name was due to their great preference for the 
seams of our kilts. As I lay down I noticed this 
braggard twitching nervously. The twitch grew 
into a vast convulsion that shook him from head 
to foot. Suddenly he sat up, looked about fur- 
tively, stared at me, and then, thinking that I 
slept, he clandestinely removed his outer and up- 
per garments and gave way to a luxurious scratch- 
ing. 

The ** seam-squirrels" had caught him at last, 
and in my intense joy at his discomfort — for he 
had boasted most gloriously of his freedom from 
attack — I awakened the balance of the company to 
view his discomfiture. Their joy equalled mine, 
but only for a little time. There is something 



126 ^^ LADIES FROM HELL" 

about the sight of a man scratching, and taking 
a keen satisfaction in it, that is contagious. I had 
not been watching the object of our mirth for more 
than two minutes before I felt every *'seam- 
squirreP' on my body. They wriggled, they 
squirmed, they crawled, and they bit. The itch 
spread over the entire billet, and for the next 
half hour the night was given over to a revelry 
of scratching. 

Then back to the line we went, and Nichols 
and I volunteered for advance listening-post duty. 
At nine o^clock that night we went out. The ad- 
vance listening-post at this section of the line was 
fifty yards from the German trench. From one 
o'clock until two was my time to watch, and it 
was during this period that Nichols was supposed 
to sleep. Along about half -past twelve, however, 
during his watch, the line to our left became 
** windy,'' which is trench parlance for nervous 
and a trifle frightened. 

The * * windiness ' ' spread from left to right, un- 
til the entire line was in an uproar and the Ger- 
mans were being severely pelted with small-arm 
fire. The ** windiness" reached its cold finger out 
into our listening-post, and when it came my turn 
to watch, Nichols told me that he was going to 
stand with me, since he was too excited to rest in 
the bottom of the trench. So we stood up there 



MR. FINDLEY'S GRAVE 127 

together, with our eyes just over the top of the 
sand-bags. 

We had been standing there together, shoulder 
to shoulder for a scant ten minutes, when Nichols 
slid along the bank toward me and leaned heavily 
against me. At first I thought he had gone to 
sleep from exhaustion, and I turned around to 
push him upright once more. As I withdrew the 
support of my body, Nichols collapsed like a 
straw-man and rolled down into the muddy bot- 
tom of the trench. 

Even then I did not realize what had happened. 
I leaned over and lifted his head in my hands. 
Just then a star-shell shot high up in the heavens 
above our little hole in the ground, and I saw 
why Nichols was *^ exhausted." 

Right in the temple he had it, and down his 
cheek and upon my hand flowed his blood. I 
watched it like a man in a stupor, so slowly it 
oozed out dark and warm. Nichols was going 
west. He opened his eyes a trifle, the lids flut- 
tered, the star-shell went out, and with it went 
old friend Nichols. He had been my pal from 
the battle for Lille until this cold wet night out 
in the front-line listening-post of Vermelles. 

I called softly to him, hoping that perhaps he 
would arouse, if only long enough to say good- 
bye. But Nick was gone. I covered him with 



128 ^^ LADIES FROM HELL" 

his waterproof sheet and stood up on the firing- 
step once more. From half -past one until relief 
arrived I watched there beside Nichols in the sap- 
head, with the Teuton army only fifty yards away. 

They carried him away on a stretcher, and 
when I returned I went to our captain and asked 
for a decent burial for Nick. Next morning six 
of us took him back on the same stretcher on 
which they had carried him out from his duty. 
No casket awaited Nick. Only a rough shroud of 
sacking and a Union Jack. Back to Vermelles 
we bore him. There we dug a little grave — God, 
but it was a shallow one! — and lifted old Nick 
down into it. We stood about with bowed heads 
for a little while, and that was the only tribute 
that poor Nichols had. 

Then I hurried away, for I could not bear to 
see the earth, cold and wet, shoveled over that 
figure which stood for one of the best friends 
a man ever had, and one of the truest patriots that 
ever breathed the breath of London's streets or 
fought in the battle for democracy. 

As I wound my way up through the communi- 
cation trench to the front line, the sport of war 
was gone, and I swore a solemn oath to avenge 
Nichols and to make the bullet that sent him west 
take its quadrupled toll of Germans. 



MR. FINDLEY^S GRAVE 129 

I immediately volunteered for sniper *s service, 
for which I was fitted by my record as a marks- 
man at the training camp. I was accepted, and 
entered upon my career as a free-for-all sniper in 
the ranks of his Majesty the King. 



CHAPTER VI 

SNIPING — THE TRAITOR AT BETHUNE — WHAT 
. HAPPENED AT LILLE 

ON receiving my credentials as a sniper, the 
freedom of our section of the trench was 
given to me, and the sniper ^s insignia of crossed 
rifles was emblazoned on my left coat-sleeve. 

Owing to the critical and delicately nervous 
work of the sniper, he is freed from the irksome 
round of trench duties that are the lot of com- 
mon soldiery. The day and the night are his to 
do with as he pleases. His association with the 
commanding officer is close, much closer than here- 
tofore. He does not even live in the trench, but 
back a little ways, where the intense strain of con- 
stant and watchful waiting may not wear upon his 
marksmanship. 

I had been a sniper for about one week, and had 
the layout of our section of the trench and of the 
opposing lines well in mind, when one afternoon 
our captain, Mr. MacKenzie, came to me and told 
me of work definitely cut out for us. Our task 
was to locate and silence a Boche machine-gun 

130 



SNIPING 131 

which had been proving its effectiveness through- 
out the previous week. 

That night, soon after darkness fell, ten of us 
crawled out into no-man's-land until we were 
within one hundred yards of the German trench. 
Here we divided into five parties of two each, and 
each party dug itself into a hole. By two o 'clock 
our work was finished, and the dirt we had dug up 
was spread about over a wide area, so as not to 
attract the attention of watchful eyes in the op- 
posing trench. In front of our five little holes 
we had transplanted some of the dank grass which 
sometimes springs up in no-man's-land under the 
influence of heavy rain and hot sunshine. 

By two o 'clock we had finished and had jumped 
into our burrows, with a sniper and an observer 
in each burrow. On my rifle I had a telescopic 
sight and a silencer, the latter making firing prac- 
tically inaudible. The telescopic sight is one of 
the devilish ingenuities of modern warfare. It 
brings the man at the business end of the gun 
to within almost reaching distance of you. You 
can pick out any place upon his body, and be- 
tween the crossed hairlines on the sight you can 
almost snip the buttons off his coat, if you so 
wish. 

Between our five holes we had strung a string, 
so that the one who first located the offending 



132 *^ LADIES FROM HELL'' 

machine-gun could signal its exact location to the 
others. Beforehand we had agreed upon a defi- 
nite code, and by sun-up we were well along to- 
ward locating the object of our endeavors. 

By careful listening, combined with the trained 
eye of our observers, who were aided by their 
binoculars, we located our gun in a concrete em- 
placement to the extreme right of our sector of 
the trench. The sniping officer gave an order 
that only the snipers on the right of our line of 
dugouts were to seek out the men behind the 
Teuton gun. 

This gun was very carefully concealed by an 
elaborate, concrete structure, carefully draped 
with moss, leaves, and debris, but in the middle 
of it was a slot about a foot high and two or three 
feet long. It was through this slot, at a distance 
of about five hundred yards, that we were to send 
our shots. Behind it we could see nothing. We 
had to trust to the guiding instrument of justice 
to seek out that machine-gun crew. 

I presume that I had fired not more than 
twelve shots when the rat-a-tat-tat which had orig- 
inally revealed it to us died away, to appear no 
more that day. Perhaps some of our shots 
reached their mark. Of course I cannot tell and 
will never know. 

Hardly had the machine-gun been silenced, how- 



SNIPING i33 

ever, when the usual scream of overhead shells 
changed their tune, and they began dropping woe- 
fully close to us. Perhaps we had been located, or 
perhaps a German observation-balloon, away off 
to the left, had picked us up. In any event, we 
dropped down into our dugouts and disappeared 
completely from the range of vision, but not before 
two of our boys on the extreme left had been killed 
by a w^ell-directed Teuton shell. Aeroplanes, too, 
had been going overhead, unimpeded by any Eng- 
lish machines, and in all probability our position 
had become the public property of the German 
gunners. 

Throughout the balance of that day our lives 
were a nightmare of expectation, for we did not 
know when one of those shells would drop into 
the narrow confines of our individual dugout, and, 
believe me, there are much more comfortable bed- 
fellows than the German ** Jack Johnson." 

At the first opportunity after nightfall we 
sneaked across and over into our own sap-head 
again, and returned to the rear. On the way back, 
as we came to a corner of the road, we stumbled 
over a prone figure, apparently in a dead stupor. 
The man was drunk. There was no denying it, 
for you could whiff the odor of rum for many 
feet about him. He had been sent back for the 
usual daily rum-ration, and on the return journey 



134 ** LADIES FROM HELL'' 

had succumbed to the wholesale temptation on 
his shoulder. Of course our officer had to report 
him, and as he was an old offender, he was placed 
under arrest, subject to a drumhead court-martial. 

Army life has many punishments, but one of the 
most extreme is the first-class field punishment 
which was meted out to this habitual drunk- 
ard. It consists in tying a man, with his hands 
held high over his head, to a convenient tree, door- 
post, or artillery wheel for two hours each day — 
one hour in the morning and one hour in the after- 
noon. This is what is known as the ^* spread 
eagle,'' and it is usually imposed for a period of 
seventy-two days, at the end of which time any 
sane man will hurry back to the straight and nar- 
row path of rectitude. 

The attitude of the soldiery toward a man so 
strung up is one of intense hatred and derision. 
The trained soldier realizes that his life and the 
lives of all his fellows depends primarily on strict 
discipline. A man condemned to first-class field- 
punishment is generally a violator of discipline, 
and as such well merits the wrath of his entire 
regiment." 

During this period of our stay the German lines 
were about six hundred yards away, and the soil 
— typical of all soil in this sector — was chalky. 
During the hot days of summer the heat radiated 



SNIPING 135 

from the ground as though it were a hot stove-lid, 
and this made it doubly difficult to do any accurate 
firing, owing to mirage. It therefore became our 
daily duty to fire **test shots" from various lis- 
tening-posts — shots directed at each foot and each 
yard of the opposing trenches — in order to keep 
our marksmanship up to the minute and to accus- 
tom ourselves to the annoying mirage that is 
prevalent during the summer. 

Foot by foot we would sweep down the German 
line, our observers meanwhile watching carefully 
for the splash of chalk-like smoke that indicated 
a hit. The necessary corrections, range, and ad- 
justment would be marked down upon a sheet, and 
so, after a few days of such experiments, we had 
our entire sector of six hundred yards thoroughly 
tabulated. 

Then we settled down to await the need for our 
services. 

Our preparations had been none too soon, for 
a German sniper was reported to be giving trou- 
ble. He had already hit six of our officers, and 
his depredations continued unabated. 

This German sniper was one of the daredevil 
variety. I suspect that he must have been a cir- 
cus clown or a loop-the-loop rider before his en- 
trance into military life. Instead of hiding him- 
self, as is the sniper's custom, this chap would 



136 '* LADIES FROM HELL" 

carelessly arise on the parapet, sometimes with 
a preliminary yell to attract our attention, and 
then would fire his rifle with exasperating aban- 
don. We came to know him as ^ * Jack-in-the- 
Box." He would bob up at odd intervals in dif- 
ferent sections of the trench. In the morning he 
might be on the extreme right, in the afternoon 
on the extreme left, and toward evening in the 
center. His very daring seemed to be in his fa- 
vor, because for over a week we worked on him 
without success. In the meantime he had ac- 
counted for four more of our men. He made a 
specialty of officers, though, as became one of his 
daring. 

Our corps of snipers quickly fell into bad re- 
pute. We dared not enter a trench, unless we 
cared to take a verbal ** strafing'' that had the 
sting of truth behind it. Day after day we waited 
for him, but always fruitlessly. 

One night we snipers got together and agreed 
upon a definite plan of campaign to wipe out this 
annoying fellow — and with him the unsavory rep- 
utation that had fallen upon our heads. 

The following morning the ten of us set out — 
each taking as his own a prearranged section of 
the German trench. We watched all that day, 
meanwhile revising our ranges and firing adjust- 
ments until I personally felt confident that I could 



SNIPING 137 

split a match, should it be lifted above the Teuton 
parapet. During our preparations, our friend 
across the way kept remarkably silent, and we 
prayed soulfully to ourselves that some random 
bullet had reached its mark. 

But no. On the second afternoon, on the ex- 
treme right of the line, we heard the familiar crack 
of a German rifle. A German rifle makes a differ- 
ent noise than does the English Lee-Enfield. The 
English gun sounds like the bang of a door, 
whereas the German rifle makes a noise like the 
crack of a giant whip — sharp, stinging, and bale- 
ful. 

Word was passed down the line that ** Jack-in- 
the-Box' ' was up to his old tricks. He had bagged 
another officer, and a snarl of derision slipped 
down the trench to me at the extreme left. As 
the minutes passed, our German dare-devil, as per 
his usual custom, paraded down his sector of the 
line and at odd intervals jumped up to taunt us or 
to fling a shot across. Closer and closer he came 
to my end of the line. 

Just opposite to me was a slight bend in the 
German trench. I figured that the Teuton sniper 
would appear here, as it brought him a trifle closer 
to our line and gave him an opportunity to prac- 
tise his pet trick of enfilade, or cross-fire. With 
the assistance of my observer I sought out every 



138 ^* LADIES FEOM HELL'' 

foot of this parapet with my experimental shots. 
I next adjusted my elevation so that future shots 
would clear the parapet by a scant six inches. 
Then I waited. 

It was a remarkably fine day for sniping. The 
air was as clear as a bell and there was little mi- 
rage to annoy one. Far up to the right I saw the 
fellow bob up and down, and I figured that my 
section of the line would be his next appearance. 
At a word from my observer, I peered through 
my sight and saw the top of his head moving along 
the chosen sector of the German parapet. He was 
playing into my hands for a surety. Evidently, 
from the motion of his head, he was conversing 
with some one just below, but hardly enough of 
his anatomy showed itself as yet to warrant my 
risking a shot. I had him well covered, and in 
the powerful telescopic sight I could almost see 
every hair on his head, for, with typical bravado, 
he had not bothered to protect himself with the 
usual gray-colored cap of a Hun sniper. 

Gradually, across the hair-line of my sight, his 
face appeared, and then his chest. He rested his 
rifle with his usual debonair flourish, sighted it 
very carefully, and then apparently the dandy's 
collar hurt him, for he made a motion as though 
to stretch his neck and release his Adam's apple 
from uncomfortable pressure. Through my rifle- 



SNIPING 139 

sight the whole action was as clear as though it 
were ten feet away, and I smiled quietly as I 
pulled the trigger. 

There was a crack, my observer shouted, and I 
could see our friend, the Boche jack-in-the-box, 
flop forward across the Teuton parapet like a be- 
headed chicken. The honor of the snipers' corps 
had been retrieved, and my old friend Nichols had 
been avenged. 

Within a week we moved out of Vermelles to 
within about five kilometers of Bethune. Our 
billets were in a wee bit of a village, which for 
some reason the Germans had marked for shell- 
fire. Throughout our stay there we were under 
constant punishment, and the business of dodging 
shells became an obsession with us. I remember 
that this town, despite its popularity with the 
German artillery, boasted six untouched estam- 
inets. I was in one of them one afternoon when 
the steady screeching of the shells overhead 
turned to a more livid scream, and we knew that 
they were coming our way. 

Two blocks away we heard one. Then came an 
explosion outside that stopped our hearts and 
pulled the breath out of our lungs. We counted 
heads, and the twelve of us were still drinking our 
chocolate unharmed. But not so next door. The 
shell had fallen in the back-yard of the adjoining 



140 ^'LADIES FROM HELL'^ 

house, and debris and splinters, flying through 
the windows, had laid low two of our company. 
By some stroke of misfortune the two who had 
gone west through the ministrations of this ran- 
dom shell, directed far behind the line, had been 
with us unharmed since the very beginning. The 
Battle of the Marne and the horrors before Lille 
had left them unscathed. Such is the luck of war- 
fare. 

From here we moved back to Bethune, where 
report had it that a spy was located. Through 
some means he had been directing the Teuton ar- 
tillery-fire with uncanny accuracy. 

The first morning that I was down in the busi- 
ness district near the railroad yard, I and my com- 
rades noticed what others had already noticed, 
namely, an unholy number of locomotive-whistles 
coming from the switching-yard behind the depot. 
We also noticed that several minutes after each 
whistle-blast a German shell came over and sought 
out some particularly vulnerable spot, such as a 
cross-roads or a warehouse. 

We were not the only ones who marked this 
strange coincidence, and immediately a watch was 
set upon the railroad yard. Persistent search 
among the puffing locomotives betrayed the fact 
that a certain engineer was doing far more than 
his share of whistle-tooting. Once suspicions 



SNIPING 141 

were aroused, it was easy to imagine that its toots 
ran perilously near a code. Furthermore, regard- 
less of where the shells hit, this locomotive seemed 
always to be at a distant place. In war-time a 
little suspicion is ample and sufficient ground for 
action. One does not have to blow up an ammuni- 
tion-depot in order to be called before a court- 
martial as a spy. The engineer of the suspected 
locomotive was taken into custody and subjected 
to the * * third degree, ' ' which is about ten degrees 
hotter than the * * third degree ' ' of a police depart- 
ment. 

After sufficient persuasion this engineer, who, 
by the way, was a Frenchman, admitted that he 
had been working under the orders of a certain 
alderman or other dignitary of Bethune, who like- 
wise was a Frenchman. He admitted that his 
whistles had been arranged according to a prede- 
termined code, this code being changed each day. 

A daily change of code meant a daily and close 
communication with the German lines. The 
means of communication adopted by this traitor- 
ous Frenchman was far closer than you might 
imagine. He had a private telegraph-wire run- 
ning underground to German headquarters. Over 
this he had been conversing for some time in a 
most leisurely and carefree manner. 

We need not go into detail as to what happened 



142 '^LADIES FROM HELL'' 

to these two ** patriots." It is sufficient to say- 
that they will not bother Bethune again. I tell 
this incident as an indication of the fact that Ger- 
man intrigue does not stop with your lowly peas- 
ant working in the fields of Flanders, but aspires 
to higher offices and more noble heads. 

At this point in my career one incident stands 
out with vivid clearness. This was our first bath 
since coming to the firing-line. Outwardly we 
were as clean and polished as any diplomat, for 
such are the rules and regulations of the British 
army. They say that if you peel away but a gen- 
eration from a Goorkha, you will have the original 
stone-age man. I will stand sponsor for the state- 
ment that if you peel away the clothing of a sol- 
dier who has been in the trenches for six weeks, 
you will find ample proof of the old adage that 
all is not gold that glitters. Your Tommy's face 
will shine like Shakespeare's school-boy; above 
the collar he will be as scrupulously clean as the 
kitchen floor of a Holland hausfrau; but below 
that collar's dead-line — or shall I call it dirt-line? 
— the description can best be left unsung. What 
you do not know cannot hurt you. 

You can imagine that a bath was something of 
an event. It stands out much more clearly in my 
mind than does many a trench raid. We bathed 
in groups of one battalion every few minutes. 



SNIPING 143 

There was none of your lazy Sunday-morning 
bathing. We entered a long room where twenty- 
five or thirty showers, each in a little private stall, 
were spouting steam and profanity. At a whistle 
from the end of the room the showers cast forth 
twenty-five or thirty fairly presentable Tommies, 
and another twenty-five or thirty men took their 
places. The contrast in color between those en- 
tering and those leaving was marked. 

Three minutes was the time allowed for bath- 
ing. The water started off hot. After about a 
minute and a half it cooled. When it became cold 
you knew you had about fifteen seconds remain- 
ing for your ablutions. 

Three minutes is mighty scant time in which 
to remove the accumulated filth of weeks. Con- 
stant practice in the art of bathing by order did 
not enable me to complete my toilet in the proper 
manner. I always had to finish it in the drying 
room, where we were handed a towel which also 
performed the offices of a scrub brush. 

By this time in its military career our regiment 
had saddled itself with a reputation. We had 
been particularly successful in many minor un- 
dertakings, and had become known as good men 
to call upon when something had to be done and 
done quickly. Our officers invariably volunteered 
for all sorts of unwelcome duties, and while we 



144 ^^ LADIES FEOM HELL'' 

gloried somewhat in our reputation, we likewise 
found it very irksome. Hence it was not with 
great joy that we received the call to build a road. 

Over in your country I believe they sometimes 
use convicts to build roads. Certainly no self- 
respecting laboring man would stoop so low. But 
when you are in the army you do what you are 
told and consider yourself amply rewarded if you 
come out alive. Mere fatigue is nothing more 
than an everyday occurrence. Hence the build- 
ing of a road called forth little more than the ordi- 
nary amount of grumbling. 

Four hundred of us went out, armed with picks 
and shovels, and started digging about three kilo- 
meters outside of Bethune, in order to enable the 
military trucks to avoid the town and the detour 
and shell-fire that it meant. 

We had hardly set to work when a German 
aeroplane appeared away off in the distance — 
about five kilometers, I should say. It was 
headed in our direction. When about three kilo- 
meters away, it circled up to about three thousand 
feet and then swung in a wide ring above our 
heads. Three men were set to watch it, for even 
in those days German aeroplanes were not the 
most welcome visitors to an unarmed body of sol- 
diers. 

Eeport of its arrival was flashed to our aerial 



SNIPING 145 

squadron, and two of our doughty fighters were 
sent up to meet it. The German saw them com- 
ing and bored straight down upon them. Faintly 
we could hear his machine-gun ripping out its song. 
He missed and shot upward again. Our two 
planes followed suit, and the battle drifted away 
into the distance, where the nationality of the 
planes was lost. But we could still see them 
gyrating like crazy bugs before an arc-light. Up 
and down, back and forth, they went. At times 
a head-on collision seemed imminent. But at 
last our Teuton friend volplaned downward in a 
long arc that marked him as either hit or fleeing 
with all speed toward friendly quarters. 

Returning to town, we passed a house which 
had already become familiar to me as the home of 
Therese. Therese was a French girl who was 
living with relatives in Bethune. Her former 
home had been in Lille, and she had been there 
during the time of the German occupation. I had 
come to know her very well, and had often called 
there to pass the time of day and to enjoy some 
of her family's cooking and good cheer. In fact, 
I had been taken in as almost a member of the 
family, and, though my French was extremely 
weak and their English even weaker, we got on in 
jolly good fashion. 

As I passed that evening, she and her relatives 



146 ''LADIES FROM HELL'' 

were sitting out in front of their house enjoying 
the cool of coming night, so I called out a rather 
broken invitation to take a walk. To this she 
heartily assented. It was during this walk that 
she told me some of her first-hand experiences dur- 
ing the German occupation of Lille. 

It seems that Therese had been living with her 
aged grandparents, her father and mother, and 
a younger brother and sister. The Germans ' first 
move, on entering Lille, had been to ransack the 
entire town. Her grandfather, an old warrior 
and a fighter still, despite his years, had come 
upon one of his friends being brutally beaten by 
a German officer in the street. Therese told me 
that her grandfather was not familiar with the 
German order concerning fire-arms, and had im- 
mediately rushed into his home and taken a pot- 
shot at the officer from the window. The sound 
of the shot brought a horde of Germans from all 
directions, and the entire household was hauled 
into the street for ** examination, ' ' as the officer 
in charge was pleased to call it. 

This * * examination ' ' consisted of brutally mal- 
treating the womenfolk and lining the menfolk of 
the household up before them for immediate de- 
spatch by a firing-squad. The latter was made up 
of practically the entire company of Germans, all 



SNIPING 147 

of whom appeared insanely anxious to prove their 
marksmanship at twenty yards. 

The women were then brought to headquarters. 
Therese's mother and grandmother were sent in 
opposite directions, and Therese was detained. 
Fortunately she had not been put under heavy 
guard, and had been able to procure a peasant 
boy's outfit of clothing. This she donned and, 
traveling by night, managed to pierce the Ger- 
man lines and to reach our own lines in safety, 
as an itinerant peddler. 

This much Therese told me of her own experi- 
ences. She said little of the actions of the Ger- 
mans toward herself, though from that little one 
could gather much. The Teutons had ransacked 
every home in Lille, and of those who stayed, many 
were shot for imaginary or entirely fictitious 
causes. Everything in the city had been carried 
away. Pictures fastened to the walls were 
slashed so as to utterly destroy their value. 
Every bit of iron, steel, copper, and lead had dis- 
appeared. All families had been utterly separ- 
ated. The men had been sent away in one di- 
rection and the women in another. 

I say that the women were sent away. The 
women were not all sent away. As fast as the 
Germans could operate, the men of Lille were 



148 '^LADIES FROM HELL'' 

taken to one end of the town and all the women 
to the other. Here the younger women were 
separated from the older, and the older women 
were sent away to goodness knows where. The 
younger women were taken before the command- 
ing officer. I need not carry the story further. 
Enough has already been written about German 
methods. Let me merely add that little bits which 
I pieced together from Therese's story added a 
mighty weight to all that now rings in our ears 
as samples of German kultur. 

In speaking of the Germans' treatment of the 
womenfolk, Therese seldom spoke of the private 
German soldier. It was usually the officers. In 
recording this, however, I do not feel that I hang 
any laurels on the virtue of the Teuton private. 
He never had a chance at the womenfolk. Ger- 
man orders are, ** officers first." 

Before the war I have heard of the unspeak- 
able boorishness of the German officer. I know 
enough of the German officer's attitude toward 
womenfolk in peace-time to imagine what his atti- 
tude would be toward hostile, defenseless women 
in war-time. But my imagination has proven a 
weak and effeminate thing. Therese 's tale of 
German tortures, reinforced by other and equally 
authoritative tales that I heard, allows me to 
know beyond peradventure of a doubt that the 



SNIPING 149 

German creed to-day reads, **Kill, but enjoy even 
as you kill.'* 

That evening reinforced our friendship, and her 
recitation of the troubles she had undergone 
brought Therese closer to me. We agreed to ex- 
change lessons in French and English. These 
had progressed only a little way, however, when 
we were again ordered away, and, as a parting 
jest, I asked her to write to my mother, saying 
that I did not have the opportunity to write her 
before leaving. Therese took my jest in earnest, 
however, and my mother treasures to-day a four- 
page letter from this little French girl who had 
been through the horrors of Lille, but still had 
heart enough to write a British Tommy's mother 
that he was well and happy, and, like all the Eng- 
lish, was doing *^his bit." 

There is one phase of ** doing your bif of which 
you hear but little. That is the **Blue Funk,'' or 
* * Firing Squad. ' ' In the armies of your laboring 
men the man who does not do his earnest best is 
discharged. The man who disobeys orders is sub- 
ject to nothing worse than a reprimand. But 
**over there," as you please to call it, we get no 
reprimand, and the man who does not do his earn- 
est best meets nothing weaker than a court-mar- 
tial. 

Our own regiment never found it necessary to 



150 '^LADIES FEOM HELL'' 

have a **Blue Funk Squad.'' Plainly, tlie duty 
of such a squad is to execute those guilty of in- 
subordination or cowardice. Cowardice is the 
commonest of trench troubles. To feel cowardice 
is no crime, but to show cowardice is punishable 
by death. A good friend of mine, an officer, told 
me that all the firing squads in kingdom come 
could not have held him in the front line during 
a heavy shelling. He said that only the fear of 
losing the respect of his men kept him with them. 
This statement from an officer who is now dec- 
orated for bravery will give you some indication 
of the fear that very naturally prevails in the 
front-line trenches during an attack. 

"Fear of the firing squad, in all probability, keeps 
few men from showing cowardice. I honestly be- 
lieve that the honor of the regiment and the fear 
of what other men will think holds more men to 
their duty in the face of danger than does any 
firing squad in Flanders. Oftentimes I will 
vouch for the fact that a sudden and sure death 
is far preferable to the hellish waiting. I believe 
that before Lille some of us would have run back, 
firing squad or no, had not the honor of the regi- 
ment been at stake. It is the honor of the regi- 
ment, reinforced by stern discipline, which holds 
you in your place. 

Once more let me emphasize to all American 



SNIPING 151 

troops the need for rigid obedience to discipline. 
You may not receive war's real discipline while 
training in America, or even while training in 
France, but when you get up into the front line 
discipline must he observed. 

It is one of the million things which will win 
the war for democracy. It is so rigidly inf orced 
among English troops that a man who does not 
return on time from leave in London is shot after 
only a very formal court-martial. Cowardice 
gives no opportunity to plead an alibi. Lateness 
from leave permits you to plead extenuating cir- 
cumstances. But believe me, my friend, little 
short of drugging or a blackjack on the head in 
a dark alley will prove sufficient alibi for a stern 
military court-martial. 

Therefore I say, respect your officers, respect 
them not only as men, but as the representatives 
of that central and unifying intelligence by which 
alone this war will be won. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE FAEM-HOUSE BETWEEN THE LINES — **SEND US 
MOEE ammunition'* — THE SPY AT HEADQUAR- 
TERS 

FROM Bethune we were again sent up to the 
firing-line twelve kilometers distant. On the 
way, as we neared the front, we encountered dug- 
outs filled with reserve soldiery. This was a new 
system recently adopted by the British, and dis- 
placed the old method of quartering reserves far 
behind the line. It made them more mobile and 
enabled a given sector to be handled by fewer 
troops. 

No sooner had we reached the front-line trench 
than word was passed to us to be on the lookout 
for a German machine-gun emplacement which 
had been so carefully hidden by the Germans that 
it had clicked its toll of death for over ten days 
without being located. 

It fell to the lot of McKenzie and myself that 
evening to stand watch at a listening-post about 
fifty yards from the German front line. It was 
a peculiarly nasty evening ; a fine rain pelted down, 

152 



THE FARM-HOUSE 153 

and a cold breeze that belonged more in March 
than in June chilled one to the marrow. Hardly 
had we taken our places when word reached us 
that a bombing-party of Germans might be ex- 
pected at any moment. This same bombing-party 
had made itself thoroughly obnoxious for three 
nights running, and it was to be expected that it 
would continue its depredations until interrupted 
by the sudden demise of its members. 

With this reassuring news to cheer us on, we 
took our places on the fire-step. At eleven o ^clock 
I went on duty. As is the custom, T came off duty 
one hour later and stretched myself out at the 
bottom of the dugout, while McKenzie stood 
watch. 

At 12:30 a sergeant came running out to the 
sap-head. He asked us if we had heard any sus- 
picious noises. Upon receiving a negative reply, 
he explained that our machine-gun emplacement, 
which commanded a neighboring road, had been 
entirely wiped out by the German bombing-party 
but three minutes before. Hardly were the words 
out of his mouth when our entire line burst forth 
into a blaze of flares and musketry, and, clearly 
outlined in the middle of no-man's-land, we could 
see the German party scurrying across, like rats 
in an open field. 

Immediately an enfilading fire from our ma- 



154 *' LADIES FROM HELL'' 

chine-guns reached out for them. It wavered for 
a moment to their right, and then it swept across 
them, clung to them, and another German bomb- 
ing-party was wiped out. 

But still the obnoxious Teuton machine-gun em- 
placement remained a mystery, and it became the 
duty of six of us, under the command of an offi- 
cer, to go out the following evening and put a 
quietus upon this obstreperous gun. 

We went about ten o'clock, armed only with 
trench-knives and revolvers. Between us was 
stretched a rope, much after the fashion of Alpine 
climbers. The usual code of signals had been 
arranged so that the lieutenant in front could in- 
form any or all of us of his intentions. It was 
our little job to locate the exact position of the 
machine-gun emplacement. It had already been 
partially located, but to make doubly sure we were 
to send up a flare at the precise point in the Ger- 
man line where this machine-gun held forth. 

It is a comparatively simple and safe matter, 
barring accidents, to merely investigate the op- 
posing front line, but to send up a flare within a 
few yards of the opposing line is to beard the 
lion in his den. Yet this was part and parcel of 
our duty, and we went at it morally certain that 
few, if any, of us would return to our own lines. 
Three of the boys had bombs, and before leav- 



THE FAEM-HOUSE 155 

ing we all wrote letters home and made our last 
will and testament. These we left in charge of 
our comrades, for it looked like certain death. 

Out to the nearest sap-head we went. This was 
about six hundred yards from our approximate 
objective. With final instructions to the men in 
the sap-head, we set out. No-man's-land at this 
point was as bare as the top of a billiard-table, 
except here and there where a shell-hole punctu- 
ated the landscape or a bit of stubble remained, 
cut down close to the ground by the machine-gun- 
fire of the opposing lines. 

What few flares there were gave but little light, 
owing to the high wind and the misty, driving rain. 
Half way across there came a tremendous tug at 
the rope, and we all fell flat on our faces. Not 
twenty yards away, against the horizon, we could 
see the outlines of a German working-party. It 
was investigating our lines, repairing barbed wire, 
or doing some other duty of a sort peculiar to no- 
man's-land. 

Flat on our faces we remained for the better 
part of ten minutes, until it was accurately de- 
termined that the German working-party had re- 
tired to its own trenches. Then, with infinite 
pains, we worked our way up, half -crawling, half- 
standing, to the very front of the German barbed 
wire. We could hear the Teutons talking and 



156 ** LADIES FROM HELL" 

laughing, but the outlines of their machine-gun 
emplacement remained hidden. 

Up and down in front of the Teuton line we 
crawled, watching for any break in the parapet 
or any change of coloring which might disclose the 
object of our search. At last three jerks from 
our officer brought us to attention, and in response 
to his code directions we dimly discerned the 
vague outlines of an emplacement, carefully hid- 
den by debris and withered stubble. 

According to previously arranged plans, our 
bombers took up a position about ten yards to the 
right and left of the emplacement. Our officer 
then gave a signal, and our flare shot up into the 
night but a scant fifteen yards from the German 
front-line trench. 

You may wonder why it was necessary to set 
off the flare so close to the Hun stronghold. It 
was only by so doing that the lookouts in our sap- 
head could obtain the angle of fire necessary to 
reach the suspected machine-gun. Had we gone 
back and depended only upon our sense of direc- 
tion for the location of this emplacement, it would 
have remained a mystery indefinitely. But by 
drawing a sight from the listening-post on the 
right and left, we were enabled to accurately mark 
its position and to wipe it out on the following 
day. 



THE FARM-HOUSE 157 

But to return to the moment in which the flare 
hissed its way up through the driving rain. It 
had hardly left the revolver of the officer in 
charge, when the bombers hurled their charges 
full into the German trench and the whole line, 
both Teuton and British, sprang to its feet in an 
ecstasy of nerves. No-man's-land swam in a 
ghostly, yellow light. Machine-guns on both sides 
began to sing their lay, and over a thousand yards 
along the front a miniature battle immediately 
sprang into being. 

It was through this cross-fire that we of the 
observation party were expected to make our re- 
turn. By taking advantage of every scratch and 
shell-hole upon the surface of the ground, five of 
the six of us managed to drag ourselves back to 
our sap-head. Only one remained out in no- 
man's-land, and the next morning we saw him 
there, still close to the Teuton front line. 

During this period of my duty on the front 
line there was little, if any, heavy firing, but con- 
siderable scout-work was necessary as a prelimi- 
nary to an offensive at a somewhat later date. 
The location of the above German machine-gun 
emplacement was but a small part of the work in 
the preparation for a big attack. Before any at- 
tack of importance is undertaken it is necessary 
to know the opposing line as well as the Teuton 



158 '^LADIES FROM HELL'' 

himself does. Each machine-gun, each field- 
piece, each trench-mortar and even each sap-head 
must be carefully plotted and marked. 

One of the many strategic points of this sector 
was an old farm-house lying midway between the 
German and the British line. The opposing 
trenches were approximately eight hundred yards 
apart, and between them, a mere wreck, stood 
this old shambles of a house. One hundred and 
fifty yards from its doorway, in the direction of 
our trenches, stood a pump. Here we had been 
accustomed to obtain some of the most delicious 
well-water that I have ever tasted, and it had 
become one of the duties of the ration-party to 
secure a liberal quantity from this well, even 
though it was done at a considerable risk to them- 
selves. 

The Germans, however, early discovered our 
fondness for the well, and it was not long before 
they had thoroughly poisoned it and spoiled it 
for several generations to come. Not content with 
this, however, they had a way of sneaking into 
the farm-house with snipers and a portable ma- 
chine-gun, and from this point would direct a 
nasty fire up and down our sector of the line. 

Occasionally we would return the compliment, 
but as we knew nothing of the casualties caused 
by our own snipers and knew only what the Ger- 



THE FARM-HOUSE 159 

mans had done to us from the same location, it 
was determined that the next German party to 
take possession of this house would get its just 
deserts. 

We had not long to wait. That very evening, 
just at dusk, the song of a German machine-gun 
piped out from the second-story window of the 
house. A call went back to our artillery to be- 
stow a few pieces of high explosive in the gen- 
eral direction of the farm-house. But the reply 
was that they had no ammunition to waste on 
such small trifles. This was early in the war, 
when the Germans were easily throwing two shells 
to our one, and even at that we were carefully 
husbanding our scant supply. 

Since the artillery refused to aid us, it became 
our pleasure to do the job alone. Twelve of us 
volunteered for this service. I was one of the 
twelve. We waited until dark, and then set out 
across the four hundred yards that separated us 
from the house. 

In the meantime the Germans had been ex- 
tremely quiet, and we began to suspect that they 
had escaped us. But they were only biding their 
time. 

As we reached the well they evidently sighted 
us, or sighted a suspicious movement, and the 
machine-gun spat at us from its usual window 



160 ' 'LADIES FEOM HELL'' 

just above the doorway. There was nothing to 
do but fall flat and scuttle up to the house as best 
we could. When we came within fifty yards there 
was no mistaking the fact that the Germans had 
spotted us. Both the machine-gun and the snipers 
were doing their best to beat us in our race for 
the house. Our officer shouted out the command : 
* ^ Six to the back ; and six to the front ! ' ' I hap- 
pened to be one of the six who went to the front. 

We found the door barricaded, and above us 
was the machine-gun and four very accurate and 
skilful snipers. One by one the boys about me 
slipped down to their knees, victims of the fire 
from the upper window. I emptied the chambers 
of my revolver without any apparent effect, and 
then found myself alone, sheltered only by the 
scanty protection of the portal of the door. I 
silently thanked a hard-working ancestry who had 
made me as thin as the proverbial rail. A fat 
man would have found my position about as much 
protection as a dollar umbrella. 

Here I stood for a minute or two, with five of 
my comrades at my feet. Every one of them 
had been victims of the snipers' bullets. Then 
I heard the racket of the party that had gone to 
the rear. Trusting to sheer luck and to the fact 
that the same noise would be heard by the Ger- 
mans, who would then be drawn from the window, 



THE FARM-HOUSE 161 

I made a run for it. Thus I managed to get 
around the corner of the house without attracting 
the Teuton fire. 

At the back I found the boys just breaking into 
the house. Up the stairs the seven of us rushed 
as one man. The Germans were barricading the 
door of the room, but the scanty furniture that 
remained in the house afforded little material for 
their purpose. Presently we burst into their quar- 
ters, after only trifling work with an old chair 
which served us as an improvised, but effective, 
battering-ram. 

Instead of being greeted by a volley of shots, 
as we had expected, we found ^ve Germans on 
their knees, with hands uplifted, and the words 
^'Kamerad! Kamerad! il/erci//'' spouting from 
their lips like some well-rehearsed chorus. 

It was the same old piffle that you hear from 
every German when you have him cornered, and 
it met with a cold reception at our hands. Our 
officer took the floor and replied : 

** Little enough mercy you showed us a few 
weeks ago down by Lille! You had plenty of 
time to cry for mercy when we were coming across 
that last five yards. When mercy is yours to 
give, you never give it. You cut my paPs throat 
like some porker; you blinded our lieutenant! 
Mercy? Hell!'' 



162 ** LADIES FROM HELL'' 

With that the bayonets in our hands got busy, 
and there were five less Germans to wear the 
Iron Cross that night. 

I do not believe I am telling anything amiss 
when I say that since the battle for Lille we Scot- 
tish have taken few, if any, prisoners. You will 
remember how the Black Watch went over the top 
and at the German trenches. You will remember 
how some thirty of them reached the Teuton lines, 
and how they returned, stripped of all accoutre- 
ments, to be shot down like rats. With such a 
picture ever before us, do you wonder that the 
Scottish do not find it in their hearts to take Ger- 
man prisoners! Do you blame us men, who saw 
in those five Germans an opportunity to demon- 
strate that Jcultur can work both ways? There 
are those who prate loudly of turning the other 
cheek. I suspect, however, that these same 
pacifists, were the Germans entrenched at Sche- 
nectady or Buffalo, would find scant chance to 
turn the other cheek. Give a German an inch, 
and he will take a mile. The only cure for the 
German atrocity is to fight fire with fire. The 
man who can see his own pal and comrade shot 
down in cold blood, as we had seen the Germans 
shoot down our Black Watch, is not a man, if he 
can refrain and hold back his hand from avenging 
such slaughter. 



THE FARM-HOUSE 163 

From this work we went back to Vermelles 
again, to our rest-billets. Vermelles at this time 
was known to the Germans as one of our main 
arteries, and hence it was subject to a constant 
shelling which waxed intense at specified hours 
of the day. 

Eunning along beside our billet was an old 
trench which had seen service in the early days. 
It ran almost without interruption to the very 
door of an estaminet about half a mile distant. 
This trench afforded ideal protection to the hun- 
gry soldier, except for a scant one hundred and 
fifty yards of its length, where it crossed a meadow 
and became merely a hollow depression in the sur- 
face of the ground. The Germans had this spot 
carefully marked and sighted, and to cross it was 
to flirt with death with a vengeance. Neverthe- 
less the lure of the estaminet drew our whole com- 
pany across this one hundred and fifty yards once 
or twice or even three times a day, when oppor- 
tunity and the O. C. permitted. Of course the 
practice was frowned upon, although no formal 
order had been given forbidding us to go. 

One afternoon, while off duty, with some dozen 
or more of my fellows I broke the unwritten law 
and made a dash across the open ground without 
fatalities. Reaching the estaminet in safety, we 
sat down on its little porch. We were sipping our 



164 *^ LADIES FROM HELL^' 

grenadine when the usual German ** strafing'' of 
Vermelles began. 

The bombardment of a town is one of the most 
spectacular sights. It is beautiful in a terrible 
way, if observed from a generous distance. From 
our refuge we could watch it without fear of be- 
coming active participants in the destruction. 

You would hear a German gun boom, there 
would be a scream overhead, and then, after a 
pause, a terrific explosion, just close enough to 
make it interesting and to observe the effect ac- 
curately. As each shell hit — the Germans were 
using high explosives liberally that day — a geyser 
of dirt and red brick-dust shot up into the air, like 
some tremendous oil-gusher. So violent was the 
shelling that afternoon that the entire town of 
Vermelles seemed covered by a haze of black and 
red. Interspersed with the fumes and dust, oc- 
casional little cotton-puffs of shrapnel appeared. 
At intervals a house would slide out of sight, the 
victim of concussion. Through binoculars we 
could see whole dwellings lifted into the air, as 
if they had been toys, to be cast down as mere 
piles of smoking ruins. 

The German shelling lasted for about an hour 
without drawing fire from our artillery. At its 
conclusion, however, our observation balloon, in 
conjunction with our aeroplanes, had located and 



THE FAEM-HOUSE 165 

sighted a German brewery considerably behind 
their lines. In the cupola of this brewery the 
Teutons had installed a machine-gun which had 
been traversing up and down our lines for two 
or three days. 

No sooner did we sight this brewery than an 
urgent plea went forth to our artillery to direct 
their efforts upon it, and particularly upon the 
waspish occupant of the cupola. Word came back 
that they could afford but five shells. An aero- 
plane went up to check the observation and to 
make doubly sure of the accuracy of our aim. 
The first shell fell short, the second crept up just 
a trifle, and the third hit the cupola about ten 
feet below its base and exploded. Cupola, Ger- 
mans, and machine-gun jumped into the air, an 
indiscriminate mass of dust and smoke. 

To incapacitate a German machine-gun is an 
insult ; to incapacitate a German machine-gun in 
a brewery is a triple insult. Immediately the 
wrath of the Germans was reawakened, and for 
two hours Vermelles and all the intervening ter- 
ritory bore up under a tremendous shelling from 
practically every field-gun on the Teuton front. 
Our own guns were silent, of necessity, a neces- 
sity created partly from fear of being located and 
partly because of their scant supply of ammuni- 
tion. 



166 ** LADIES FROM HELL'' 

And right here let me put in a plea for ammuni- 
tion. 

You workers in the shops and factories, how 
little do you realize the intense need of the front 
line! We boys out here work, yes, we slave, for 
twenty-four hours a day, Sundays and holidays, 
rain or shine. You in your comfortable homes, 
with all the conveniences and luxuries of modern 
city life, just remember us out here and give us 
all you 've got. 

The man who stays at home to make shells or 
to make any of the munitions of war, or, for that 
matter, any of the tools which go to make these 
munitions, is not a ** slacker." We need him; we 
need hundreds and thousands of him. But the 
man who stays at home to make munitions and 
then takes every opportunity to lay off or to cut 
his time is a ** slacker.'' He is worse than a 
** slacker," for not only does he keep from us the 
fruits of his own efforts, but he keeps from us the 
fruits of another man's efforts, a man who might 
give us all he had. 

When we are up on the front line and read news- 
paper accounts of munition-workers striking or 
complaining, it brings a smile, a wry smile, to our 
lips. We can't help comparing your position with 
ours. We can't help thinking of the few cents 
per day that we receive for giving everything 



THE FARM-HOUSE 167 

we 've got, including our lives, perhaps. We can't 
help comparing our offering with the security, the 
peace, and the comfort which you receive in re- 
turn for your skill and handicraft. If every mu- 
nition-worker, if every worker on tools or acces- 
sories that go to make up munitions could only 
spend a short half -hour in a front-line trench, there 
would be little cause for the cry that echoes back 
from Flanders : 

*'Send us shells, and shells, and more shells !" 

I remember hearing the story of a visit of mu- 
nition-workers to the front-line trench. It will 
tend to prove my statement. 

Word was passed up the line that a deputation 
from the English Munition-Workers was coming 
to see if we actually needed more shells. Those 
boys back home evidently did n 't care to take our 
word for it. They knew that they were making 
hundreds, yes, thousands, of shells every day, and 
it probably appeared to them as the height of 
waste that we could use them all and still be de- 
manding more. 

When word reached us that their committee was 
about to visit us, a gurgle of anticipation ran down 
the trench, for here indeed was an opportunity to 
demonstrate the horrors of war to those most in 
need of a demonstration. 

Our officer, although he said little, managed to 



168 ** LADIES FROM HELL'^ 

egg us on in our plans for deviltry, and lie went 
back to meet the deputation of munition-workers 
with a sardonic smile on his face. 

They stepped out of a staff automobile, wearing 
Prince Albert coats and tall silk hats. Unques- 
tionably they were a stunning spectacle, a striking 
contrast, incidentally, to the grim khaki uniform 
seen everywhere along the front. 

Our commanding officer, instead of leading them 
through the usual communication-trenches, which 
were only about ankle-deep in mud, chose to lead 
them through a main drain-trench. A main drain- 
trench is somewhat similar to an intercepting 
sewer. It is designed to carry off the mud and 
water from some several hundred yards of trench. 
This particular drain-trench happened to be 
waist-deep in slimy silt. Three feet of this ob- 
noxious mud was the introduction of our diplo- 
mats from London to the horrors and inconven- 
iences of war. 

When word reached us that they were in our 
midst, our artillery, rising to the occasion, sent a 
salvo of fire over into the German lines. Never 
before had this failed to bring back a triple dose 
of German steel, but to-day, for some unaccount- 
able reason, no such reply came. The artillery 
tried its luck once more, and spent a dozen more 
of its precious shells, but still no reply came back. 



THE FARM-HOUSE 169 

The quiet became embarrassing. Not a ma- 
chine-gun spoke; not a sniper's rifle cracked across 
at us. Something had to be done, for the situa- 
tion was growing desperate. 

A non-commissioned officer had an inspiration, 
— or perhaps it had all been planned beforehand. 
In any event, dugouts were ransacked and every 
available bomb was prepared for action. As the 
munition-workers slowly plowed their way down 
the drain-trench, every one took an armful of 
bombs and, with rifles pointed in air and machine- 
guns directed anywhere, began a little battle of 
their own, a ** personally conducted'' battle, so to 
speak. 

Never was there a more realistic duplication 
of the front line when a big drive is on. 

Bear in mind that the munition-workers were 
waist-deep in mud. Their progress was slow, and 
they were hidden from our front line and our lit- 
tle comedy by a parapet. 

For about thirty minutes our boys staged one 
of the most complete and harmless battles of the 
war. As no word came to desist, it became ap- 
parent that their efforts were meeting with the 
appreciation of the commanding officer. They re- 
doubled them. Blood-curdling yells and shrieks 
combined with the noise and smoke of exploding 
grenades, until hell itself seemed to have been 



170 ^^LADIES FROM HELL'' 

turned loose in this particular sector of the trench. 

All the ^\me the Germans had been serenely 
quiet, although a demonstration such as this on 
any other day would have called forth the se- 
verest reprimand in the shape of a bombardment 
of an hour or more. 

To our left at this time was a bridge, known 
among the boys as * * London Bridge. ' ' It spanned 
a little stream which ran across no-man's-land 
between the German and English lines. No one, 
to date, had been able to cross this bridge alive, 
and you can imagine our astonishment when we 
saw our officer lead the deputation of munition- 
workers to the bridge-head and invite them to 
cross. 

This seemed to be carrying the farce a little 
too far, but the officer evidently knew his busi- 
ness, for very graciously and politely he invited 
them to cross first, saying that he would follow 
them. 

To our horror, they started across, graphic il- 
lustrations of the old adage that *^ ignorance is 
bliss." We fully expected to see them wiped out 
before they had gone ten feet, but not only did 
they go ten feet, but half way across, and then 
loitered on the edge and viewed the scenery there- 
abouts. 

Not a shell or rifle-shot came over from the 



THE FARM-HOUSE 171 

German lines. They were as quiet as a tomb. 
After a brief conference in the center of the bridge, 
the bedraggled, mud-soaked deputation moved on, 
followed by our commanding officer on the run. 
He had hardly made the crossing when a German 
high-explosive shell screamed after him. By 
sheer luck it alighted only a hundred yards from 
the munition-workers. Three of our boys gave 
up their lives to this shell, but never have lives 
been given to better advantage. The munition- 
workers were tremendously impressed. They 
told our commanding officer that they had long 
desired to see a tremendous battle, and now that 
they had seen one and had tasted the horrors of 
war, they were going to return and do their ut- 
most to double and triple Britain's output of 
shells. They also announced that, as they had a 
tremendous amount to do that day, they would 
like to hurry away. Back they went, firmly con- 
vinced that the front line does need ** shells, and 
shells, and more shells." 

You may wonder why the Teutons were so quiet. 
We wondered, too, until a few days later a Ger- 
man spy, serving in the capacity of interpreter 
at our headquarters, was captured and given the 
usual punishment meted out to such gentry. The 
coming of these ammunition-workers had been 
common talk about headquarters for days, and 



172 '* LADIES FROM HELL'' 

their contemplated arrival had been duly for- 
warded to the Germans. With their usual clever- 
ness, the latter had forecast the result of absolute 
quiet, and so withheld their fire in the hope that 
the munition-workers would be influenced and that 
as a result our supply of shells would diminish, 
rather than increase. 

It may interest you to know that this same spy 
had been intimately connected with the failure of 
our attack at Lille. He was the man who warned 
the Germans of the impending assault. I have 
since heard prisoners say that the Germans ex- 
pected us three days before we struck. They ad- 
mitted this very frankly, when captured. As a 
matter of fact, the battle for Lille was planned for 
a Thursday. You will remember that it didn't 
take place until the following Sunday. It had 
been postponed at the last minute. 

This same spy had also been connected with our 
cordial hostess who had the friendly pup who 
wore a hollow collar. It was through the medium 
of this dog that he forwarded despatches to the 
German lines, and it was by his efforts that they 
were advised of the old lady's arrest. With his 
arrest and confession many peculiar ** coinci- 
dents" were cleared up and vanquished for all 
time. 

While returning from watching the bombard- 



THE FAEM-HOUSE 173 

ment of Vermelles I inadvertently allowed myself 
to be observed by a German sausage-balloon, or 
by some company of snipers, and became the re- 
cipient of a cordial dose of shrapnel and musketry 
fire. I needed no second invitation to hasten my 
pace, and bounded around the corner of my billet, 
only to run head-on into my officer. He spun 
round like a top, and fell on the back of his neck 
with a resounding thud. 

Springing to his feet in a rage, he roundly 
abused me, first as a ruffian, and then, as sober 
judgment returned to him, as a man who had dis- 
obeyed orders by going down the communication- 
trench to the estaminet. Partly as punishment 
for disobeying orders, and partly as a handy vent 
for his spleen, he sentenced me to an extra fatigue. 
This consisted in carrying wire and other engi- 
neering tools up to the front line to repair barbed- 
wire fences and to aid in similar work. 

My duties were to begin immediately. At night- 
fall, with a company of about fifteen others who 
were loaded down with tools and accessories of 
all sorts, I crawled along *' Shrine Road,'' so 
called because of the little shrine set up at 
its intersection with the communication-trench. 
** Shrine Eoad" ran parallel to the German lines 
and was often subject to heavy shell- and mus- 
ketry-fire. It so happened on this evening that 



174 *^ LADIES FROM HELL'' 

the moon was at our back. We must have been 
neatly outlined to German snipers, for we had 
hardly set out when the entire surrounding terri- 
tory jumped up in little puffs of dust, each mark- 
ing the landing-place of a German bullet. 

We immediately took to the ditch and dragged 
our heavy tools to the communication-trench. 
But, even so, we were still observed and were sub- 
jected to a heavy machine-gun fire, which swept 
across at a nasty angle and bagged three of the 
boys. 

Our line at this point bent back from the Ger- 
man line in a great half -circle. Thus to command 
it required practically double the number of men. 
It was the work of this evening to straighten this 
bend and so release the men there for service 
elsewhere. 

As soon as darkness fell we went over the top 
from a listening-post. There were about one hun- 
dred and fifty of us on the job. The German lines 
were about five hundred yards away. Five hun- 
dred yards is not a great distance when there is 
nothing between you and the German fire. But 
fortunately our occupation was not discovered, 
and we spread out across no-man's-land in a 
ragged line and began to scratch ourselves in with 
the enthusiasm of a bull-pup seeking a long-buried 
bone. 



THE FARM-HOUSE 175 

At frequent intervals we would hear across the 
stillness of the night the preliminary hiss of a 
flare, and, from a forest of bobbing heads, no- 
man's-land became as vacant as a cemetery, to all 
outward appearances, at least. 

We were barely well started on our work, when 
our outposts' screen, about thirty feet in front 
of us, reported a strong German working-party 
coming our way. Rifles were hurriedly secured 
and loaded, and available protection was at a pre- 
mium. By good fortune, however, the working- 
party drifted in the opposite direction, and before 
the first streaks of dawn crept up over the horizon 
a neat trench had been prepared. The dirt had 
been evenly distributed over several yards, so that 
even from the German observation-balloon our 
new position was not apparent. 

This shortening of the line and all the prelim- 
inary work in plotting the machine-guns of the 
opposing forces was merely the prelude to a local 
attack. This took place one evening shortly after 
dusk, when five hundred yards of our line went 
over the top and at the Bavarians, who com- 
manded the Teuton trench at this sector. 

The Bavarians have a reputation as veritable 
fire-eaters. On this occasion they did not live up 
to their repute. The previous evening our scouts 
had cut long lanes through the German barbed 



176 ^^ LADIES FROM HELL'^ 

wire, and, preceded by our bombers, we rushed 
across no-man ^s-land without preliminary artil- 
lery preparation, depending largely on surprise 
for success. 

The surprise was not total, although it was 
sufficient for the purpose. We were almost up to 
the German barbed wire before their lookouts 
scented our approach. Two minutes later five 
hundred of us jumped down as one man into their 
trench. Considering the suddenness of the at- 
tack, the Germans were fairly well-prepared. I 
remember that my leap carried me squarely upon 
the back of a stalwart Teuton, who jabbed upward 
at me with his bayonet as I plunged down. The 
shock of my arrival on his shoulders diverted his 
aim and likewise scattered us both over several 
yards of trench. He recovered himself first. 
With a guttural oath, he drew back his rifle — it 
looked as big as a telegraph pole — as a prelim- 
inary to running me through. 

Up to this time I had regarded tales of one's 
last moments as being largely of a mythological 
nature. I had heard that in the last few seconds 
of a man's existence his entire life runs through 
his brain like a panorama. I now had good cause 
to repent of my ridicule, for every little detail of 
my twenty-two summers flashed upon me in inti- 
mate retrospect. 



THE FARM-HOUSE 177 

The German ^s gleaming blade, seemingly with 
infinite slowness, crept down upon me. But it 
never reached me, thanks to my commanding offi- 
cer, who was just behind me. There was the 
crack of a revolver, and the German pitched for- 
ward on top of me, his rifle spinning out of his 
hand and over the top of the trench. My fear- 
bound muscles relaxed, and I sprang to my feet, 
recovered my rifle, and rushed for a communica- 
tion-trench, which by this time was crowded with 
a milling mass of Teuton and Scottish soldiers. 

As I plunged around the corner I ran plump 
into a six-foot specimen of a Bavarian. He 
loomed up out of the night like an ox. There is 
no mistaking these chaps, even in the dark. Their 
outlines are different, their helmets are shaped 
differently, and their packs are placed differently. 
I think my arrival was as much a surprise to him 
as his arrival was to me. Our rifles, bayonet 
first, went back over our heads like one, but I was 
quicker on recovering. I lunged forward, forget- 
ful of all the instructions of our bayonet-tutor back 
in England. But perhaps I did remember them 
subconsciously, for my bayonet found its mark 
neatly under the chin of the Bavarian. At the 
time I felt no special anxiety about his future con- 
duct, for he collapsed with a grunt. I pulled 
my rifle cut — it had been almost jerked from my 



178 ^^LADIES FROM HELL" 

hand by his weight — and rushed on to assist my 
comrades in the communication-trench. 

By this time the Bavarians were in full retreat 
back to their second line. Some of our boys in 
their eagerness had followed them across the 
open ground above the trench. This was unfor- 
tunate, for all of these lost their lives, owing to 
the fire of our machine-guns which were directed 
indiscriminately toward the fleeing Germans. 

With the winning of the last yard of trench, we 
each pulled from our belt three sandbags, and 
the communication-trenches were barricaded and 
fully covered by enfilading machine-guns. It was 
only then that we had time to cool off and review 
the evening's work. Probably the entire attack 
and the completion of our barricade had not taken 
more than half an hour at the outside, but, as we 
sifted back into the trench proper and the heat 
of battle left us, some of the horror of it took pos- 
session of us. 

There were Germans all around, and there were 
some of our boys, too. One group still flashes up 
before me in the night. It was a German and a 
Scotty, locked in each other's arms. Each had 
run the other through with his bayonet at pre- 
cisely the same instant, and they had closed in 
death's embrace, to remain there until we pulled 
them apart. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE BKITISH AIR SERVICE BECOMES STRONGER — THE 
REFUGEE FROM LILLE — WE FIND OUR WOUNDED 
SERGEANT 

IN the face of the many accounts of aeroplane 
fights with which we are regaled to-day, any of 
the little aeroplane battles which I observed in the 
beginning of the struggle seem puny and weak. 
You must remember that in 1915 the aeroplane 
was in its infancy. Indeed, at that date, even 
though the Germans had few planes, — they pre- 
ferred the Zeppelin — their aerial forces gener- 
ally held dominance over those of the English. 
Both sides used extensively what planes they had, 
but the battle-plane was in its cradle, and a sin- 
gle type of plane often served as observation-, 
scout-, and battle-plane in one. This made the 
struggle of opposing planes none the less interest- 
ing, however, although considerably rarer than 
to-day. 

At some time in your experience in the front 
line you are likely to be appointed to aero-scout- 
duty. In this capacity you are instructed to keep 
an eagle eye out for any approaching Tauhes and 

J79 



180 ^* LADIES FROM HELL'' 

to sound two shrill blasts on a whistle as an an- 
nouncement of their approach. 

At such times every one had iron-clad orders to 
seek cover immediately. There must be no de- 
lay, the idea being to impress the German observer 
with the absolute bareness of the landscape and 
to hide from him any troop movements. 

Outside Vermelles I remember seeing one of 
the prettiest battles between an aeroplane and 
our anti-aircraft guns that it has ever been my 
privilege to observe. It was one of those won- 
derfully clear June days, ideally adapted to aero- 
plane observation. The sun had just swung up 
over the horizon, when through my binoculars I 
caught the approach of a German Taube, with its 
characteristic black cross on the under wing. 

I announced the fact to our anti-aircraft gun- 
ners, and they immediately wheeled their guns 
into position, in order to reach the German when 
he was practically overhead. He swung about in 
wide, cautious circles for five or ten minutes, and 
then, at a word from the commander of the anti- 
aircraft guns, there came the ripping crash, 
thrice repeated, of a three-barreled rifle. 

Perhaps you have observed a display of fire- 
works from across a lake or a field. You will 
remember the sharp crack of the mortars, the 
long wait, and then the burst of multicolored stars 



THE BRITISH AIR SERVICE 181 

liigh up in the heavens, followed by the crackle 
of distantly exploding rockets. The bombard- 
ment of an aeroplane affords much the same spec- 
tacular display. There is the sharp boom — boom 
— boom of the anti-aircraft gun, and then the wait 
while the shells spin their way upward. Pres- 
ently there are three splashes of cotton, which 
spray out in jagged lines across the heavens, and 
from far off comes the ominous crackle of the 
exploding shrapnel. 

We had quite a force of anti-aircraft guns con- 
centrated on the German, and he turned his nose 
upward in order to escape the deluge. But we 
got him. The gunner to our left reached up and 
apparently crippled his engine or punctured his 
gasoline-tank. In any event, either his engine 
or his control was badly shattered, for he spun 
like a top, righted himself, and then staggered 
first one way and then the other, like a drunken 
bat. 

You could not help admiring the fellow and the 
skill which he exhibited. In long, inebriated vol- 
planes he slid down and down, until he was only 
about a thousand feet above us, when he appar- 
ently exerted every effort to obtain control over 
his staggering craft. But it was of no avail. 
High above our heads he plunged backward, and 
then shot down like a comet to the ground. 



182 '^LADIES FROM HELL'' 

Of course, since the early days of the war we 
have heard more or less of atrocities. In your 
country I have seen and talked with people who 
hold the opinion that atrocities are a myth. That 
no war has ever been fought withou*t the occur- 
rence of some atrocities is true. A thousand or a 
million men cannot be gathered together without 
some of them overstepping commands and de- 
cency. But from all corners of the line word 
kept seeping in to us of peculiarly horrible muti- 
lations practiced by the German troops. 

I have heard it said that such atrocities are 
practiced under orders of the German High Com- 
mand. I will take no issue with this fact. I 
have heard the German High Command blamed 
for all atrocities. Neither will I argue this point. 
I only know that the man who commits the atrocity 
is the German private. He may be acting under 
orders, but the blood is on his hands, though the 
legal blame may reach higher. 

I myself place full blame upon the German 
trooper, the private, for the atrocities which I 
know to have been practiced. Whether he is act- 
ing under orders or not does not influence my de- 
cision. I only know that if our officers — or yours 
— asked their men to practice the brutalities so 
common among German troops, those officers 
would either be accidentally ( ?) shot or openly dis- 



THE BRITISH AIR SERVICE 183 

obeyed. The only possible alibi I can see for 
the German trooper's actions and his obedience 
to orders from higher up is the propaganda which 
has been pumped into him from earliest child- 
hood. He has been **fed up'' on the beauties of 
lust and blood. He has been taught that God 
smiles on the German murderer. Any man who 
is fool enough to believe this sort of slime has no 
excuse, in my eyes, for his obedience. 

There has been considerable talk in your coun- 
try of exaggeration, of falsification, in reporting 
German atrocities. Therefore it is with great 
caution that I pen my own experiences and my 
own observations along this liae. Some of them 
I witnessed personally and can vouch for with 
my own eyes. Others came to me directly, in a 
manner which I cannot doubt in the slightest par- 
ticular. I have eliminated from the following in- 
cidents any and all reports which might savor in 
the least of rumor or exaggeration. 

At Bethune there was an estaminet, kept by an 
old French woman and her two daughters. She 
had assisting her a young French girl of about 
eighteen years, who had one arm missing from 
the elbow down. This girl was strangely taciturn, 
and our boys dubbed her **The Silent Partner," 
in derision of her shyness and quiet. 

I had come to realize, however, that many of 



184 ** LADIES FROM HELL*' 

these French peasants who talk little, know much, 
and I made it my business to get better acquainted 
with this girl. Gradually, piece by piece and 
little by little, I won her story from her. 

She, too, had been at Lille during the German 
occupation. Her younger brother, her father, and 
her mother had lived with her in one of the middle- 
class sections of the town. Her father, it seems, 
had hurried home from his shop upon the Ger- 
man occupation, and had found the Germans at- 
tempting to break into his home. He argued with 
them and then, with bare hands, attempted to 
drive them off. He had hardly lifted his arm 
against them before he was overpowered, and the 
entire family — mother, brother, and father — ^were 
taken out and shot in cold blood upon their own 
doorstep. 

The girl was brought before the commanding 
oJQficer, who passed her on to the officers' mess. 
Here, in a drunken orgy, they maltreated her un- 
til she swooned away. As she regained con- 
sciousness, she tried weakly to raise herself, 
and in so doing grasped hold of the door-knob. 
One of the drunken wolves, who had been a leader 
in the deviltry, picked up a chair and crashed it 
down upon her outstretched arm, splintering the 
bone in several places. Whether or not the sub- 
sequent amputation was necessary, I do not know. 



THE BRITISH AIR SERVICE 185 

In any event, her arm was amputated, and until 
her escape from Lille she was forced to lead a 
harlot's life among the German troops. 

This was the tale I coaxed from the lips of a 
reticent French girl who had been through a Ger- 
man occupation. She told it not willingly or with 
braggadocio, but as a story coming from the heart 
and one too awful to spread broadcast. 

Another case comes to my mind, the case of 
one of our men who escaped from the Germans 
and returned to our lines. He had been shot 
through the hand. This, in itself, is an incon- 
siderable wound, and on showing it to the Ger- 
man surgeon he had expected nothing more than 
a casual bandage. The German, however, told 
him that an operation would be necessary, and 
they lifted him upon the operating table without 
further ado. 

''You will give me an anesthetic, of course, 
won't you?'' said my friend. 

''What!" replied the German surgeon. "An 
anesthetic for a schwinehundf and forthwith the 
operation continued, while my friend was held 
down by a group of grinning Teuton soldiers. 

What do you suppose that German surgeon did 
for a simple shot through the hand? In the first 
place he cut all the tendons of my friend's hand. 
Then he removed the bone from the middle finger 



186 '^LADIES FROM HELL'' 

in such a manner that the entire hand became ab- 
solutely useless and might as well have been en- 
tirely removed. 

In one of the minor advances in which we en- 
gaged we returned without our sergeant. The fol- 
lowing day, in a second attempt to retake the cov- 
eted ground, we came upon him. He had been 
captured, evidently while in a dazed condition 
from a shell-wound in the head. A rifle-bullet had 
grazed the front of his skull above the eyebrow, 
making nothing more than a flesh wound, but 
probably rendering him senseless or dazed for a 
considerable period. 

What treatment do you think the Teutons gave 
this wounded soldier? I do not know. I only 
know that I, with my own eyes, found him trans- 
fixed through the chest with a bayonet, the point 
of which had been shoved into a barn-door. 
There he hung, mute testimony to the German 
treatment of wounded prisoners. 

One of the boys coming down to us from a neigh- 
boring sector told of an advance there in which 
they captured one of the small villages whose 
name now escapes me. He told me that as they 
entered the village — this was a surprise attack — 
they came upon twelve women, three of them wan- 
dering about crazed beyond all recall. Eight 
others were lying dead upon the public square. 



THE BRITISH AIR SERVICE 187 

all naked as Mother Eve, victims of German bru- 
tality. 

Another story comes to my mind which for 
sheer hideous inhumanity exceeds all imagination. 
One of our boys had been party to an attack upon 
a village some fifteen or twenty miles distant. 
There he came upon an old French woman living 
in a little hut to the rear of her former home, 
which had been burned to the ground when the 
Germans retired. She was the sole survivor of a 
family of five. Her soldier sons had been con- 
nected with the regiment which defended the vil- 
lage. As the Germans swept through, the French 
retired, leaving their dead and wounded behind 
them. She followed the Germans and came upon 
her boy lying beside the road, fatally wounded 
and dying. 

By this time the French troops had been rein- 
forced and were sweeping the Germans back 
through the town. The Germans came upon the 
mother and her son by the roadside. As they re- 
treated, the Germans poured oil upon the houses 
and lit them, and one of these companies of incen- 
diaries stumbled across the pitiful scene of the 
mother and her dying son. 

It seems hardly possible that any man could not 
be touched by such a sight. The mother had a 
little flask of wine which she was administering 



188 ^* LADIES FROM HELL'' 

to her son in the vain hope of reviving him, if 
only for a moment. But the Germans saw in this 
scene only another opportunity to demonstrate 
their lack of human sensibility, and over this 
wounded soldier they poured their oil. Then 
with a rough jest and an oath they touched the 
flaming torch to him. 

I believe that the Eev. Newell Dwight Hillis 
speaks of this story, and I believe that he has 
photographs to demonstrate its absolute truth. 

I might go on and continue to rehearse tale 
after tale, all awful, almost unbelievable, were 
you not intimately familiar with the beast who 
breeds these horrors. Perhaps you in America 
will never believe them, until they come back to 
you on the lips of your own sons, but there is 
gradually sifting over to you some graphic demon- 
strations of the truth of the tales which you hear. 

Little Belgian children are being adopted now 
and then by philanthropic Americans, and it was 
two of these children whom I met one day upon 
the railroad platform at Schenectady, New York. 
Their odd, half-familiar dress attracted me to 
them, and I asked them, first in English and then 
in French, whither they were bound. They did 
not answer me, but a station attendant came up 
and said that they were Belgian children. I 
asked him why, if this was true, they did not 



THE BRITISH AIR SERVICE 189 

speak French, and he informed me that the chil- 
dren's tongues had been cut out. Yet more. As 
they pulled their little arms from their muffs, they 
pulled only the stumps, for their hands had like- 
wise been cut otf . 

It would do much to awaken you people in 
America to the real nature of the beast which 
knocks at your door if you could have moving- 
pictures brought to you of that sergeant of ours, 
hanging limp and lifekss, nailed to the barn-door 
with his own bayonet. It might make the word 
** atrocity'* mean something to you if you could 
see the three crazed women of whom my friend 
told me, running up and down the village streets, 
hopeless maniacs for the rest of their lives. Per- 
haps you would be less gentle with your German 
propagandists, spies, and thugs, if you had seen 
those two little tongueless, handless, Belgian 
children on the platform at Schenectady, or if 
you had talked with the little servant-girl at 
Bethune whose arm was gone and whose life was 
blasted. Then, perhaps, you would be a little 
less ready to forgive the German people, and a 
little more ready to take up arms against not only 
their government, but those brutes and imbeciles 
who make that government, possible. 



CHAPTER IX 

RAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH — ^A ** SEAM-SQUIRREL ' * 
RETURNS TO ITS HOME — BACK TO BLIGHTY AND 
THE HOSPITAL 

1 MIGHT go on telling of German atrocity after 
atrocity. I might sketch the picture of the 
old gray-headed blacksmith in a sector of our 
trench known as **Plug Street,'' who was found 
with his hands chained to his anvil, quite dead. 
His wrists had been pulverized, and a bayonet 
transfixed them like a skewer. On the end of the 
bayonet was stuck this terse statement, in a 
scrawling, German hand, **You will never shoe 
another horse." 

I might tell you of retaking trenches by counter- 
attack, and of finding our wounded with their 
throats cut from ear to ear, disemboweled, or ter- 
ribly lacerated. 

Even in those early days there was ample and 
sufficient material for an entire book about Ger- 
man atrocities. As week after week goes by new 
chapters are written, and, when the last chapter 
on this war is finally penned, the subject of Ger- 

190 



RAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 191 

man atrocities will fill several large and grue- 
some volumes. 

But you Americans are already hearing many 
of them, and a mere rehearsal of their terrible 
details would not bring them any closer to you. 
Even a graphic word-picture is not one-millionth 
as terrible as the original scene itself. It would 
be absolutely futile for me to attempt to describe 
the awful scenes which I myself have witnessed, 
or their duplicates which are common rumor in 
the trench. 

Therefore I will turn to a rather humorous 
incident. 

It was during the usual eleven o'clock **Hymn 
of Hate'' that one of my comrades and myself 
were standing in the trench. For some reason or 
other I stepped away from him some fifteen or 
twenty feet, and I turned! around to call to him 
just as a shell screamed overhead. It exploded 
about a f odt above the parapet, and the fragments 
sprayed down into the trench. 

At precisely this instant my friend felt the un- 
mistakable nip of a *^ seam-squirrel" who was 
making merry about his waistband. Just as the 
scream of the shell signaled its approach, he bent 
over, and the rain of shrapnel-bullets sped by 
over his head. Had he been standing in his nor- 
mal position, they would have caught him fairly 



192 ^^ LADIES FEOM HELL'' 

and squarely. When at last he did straighten up, 
he had the **seam-squirreP' in his hand. For a 
moment he held it thus and surveyed the course 
of the shrapnel, as indicated by the new-born 
holes in the opposite bank. Then he addressed 
himself to the bothersome rodent : 

** Feller,'' said he, **you 're the chap that saved 
my life, and I 'm just going to put you back home 
and let you have a square meal," and back into 
the luxurious folds of his kilt he deposited the 
*^ seam-squirrel" who had innocently been his 
preserving angel. 

On my last trip from our rest-billet in Bethune 
we started at high noon and directed our march 
toward Vermelles, where we arrived at six o 'clock 
that evening. 

All the way to Vermelles intense and unusual 
action of both infantry and artillery was notice- 
able. Heretofore Vermelles had been one of the 
more quiet sections of the line. It had been re- 
garded as a vacation to be sent there. Recently, 
however, this same sector had become one of the 
most unpopular. Owing to its proximity to the 
trenches, increased fire was being focussed on it 
by the Germans. 

At this time the French were preparing for a 
somewhat elaborate advance, and the preliminary 
trench-raids and minor attacks had a tendency to 



RAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 193 

excite the entire German line in that vicinity and 
to direct German wrath at French and English 
indiscriminately. As a result, from a place of 
peace and quiet, Vermelles had become a scene 
of intense and constant action, and our troops, 
knowing this state of affairs, expressed them- 
selves very pessimistically as we marched away 
toward Vermelles. 

Here I again assumed my duties as a sniper, 
and immediately upon our arrival in the trench 
I took up the usual round of trench warfare as the 
sniper sees it. 

Owing to the tenseness prevalent up and down 
the line at this point, the night was hardly less 
bright than the day. Star-shells were constantly 
shooting up, blinking, and going out. As I stood 
in a dugout on a little rise of ground I could see, 
away off to the right, the ebb and flow of battle 
as the French advanced upon the Germans or re- 
treated before them, and I subconsciously won- 
dered how much longer it would be before our 
lines would be illuminated by a flood of similar 
party-colored lights that would indicate action, 
intense action. 

On our left were the Goorkhas. I have already 
described the ungovernable tendencies of these 
chaps to revert to primeval man. Since my days 
in the front line I believe that most of them have 



194 '^LADIES FROM HELL" 

been sent to the Egyptian front, where the nerv- 
ous waiting of trench warfare does not wear upon 
them, and where their natural inclination for 
open, man-to-man fighting is given a better oppor- 
tunity to display itself. 

In trench warfare the Goorkhas are inclined to 
be extremely nervous and to fire upon the slight- 
est provocation. The best disciplined troops 
never fire without a definite object in view, but 
the Indians have a way of letting fly at mere 
myths and shadows. As a result, close prox- 
imity to them is likely to be a warm sector of 
the trench, for they keep things humming, re- 
gardless of the necessity therefor. 

Impelled by sheer nervousness, the Goorkhas 
on our left started up a stream of machine-gun- 
fire directed into the shadows of the night, and 
their excitement spread down the trench until our 
whole sector was in an uproar. Our own boys, 
however, since we heard no firing from our alarm- 
posts, held out against the nervousness of the 
position until almost midnight, when our front 
line listening-post succumbed to pressure and cut 
loose. 

Immediately our entire line was on the firing- 
step, throwing everything we had in the direction 
of the German trench, which immediately replied 
in kind and with equal enthusiasm. 



EAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 195 

By three or four o'clock, however, it became 
apparent that we were all firing at a mirage, and 
the line quieted down, but not until a German 
raiding-party, taking advantage of the noise and 
excitement, had successfully put one of our 
machine-guns out of commission. 

This was reported to us about six o'clock that 
morning, and ^ve of us were detailed to go down 
near the machine-gun and do what sniping work 
we could in retaliation for the German escapade. 

All day we spent in that sector of the line, 
taking pot-shots at a nest of Teuton snipers some 
four hundred yards away, who were neatly pro- 
tected by a clump of charred and jagged stumps. 

Of course I do not know whether we did them 
any harm. Our object was to keep the Germans 
**on edge" so far as possible; that is, to keep 
them nervous. Only incidentally was it our de- 
sire to do them harm in a physical way. 

That night MacFarland asked for six volun- 
teers to go out into no-man's-land to reconnoiter 
in preparation for a trench-raid on the following 
night. It was to be our duty to make a thorough 
investigation of the German outer defenses, and 
to find out as much as we could concerning the 
strength of the opposing forces. 

Of course we took with us only the usual tools 
for a trench-raid — our revolvers and trench- 



196 ** LADIES FROM HELL'' 

knives. Before going, MacFarland indicated to 
us that this was no ordinary raid on which we 
were bound, and after explaining what he had in 
mind he gave any or all of us a chance to back out. 

But none of us withdrew, and so, toward mid- 
night we set out from a sap-head that brought 
us within two hundred yards of the German 
barbed wire. 

Across no-man's-land we snaked, dodging flares 
and doing our utmost to become an intimate part 
of the scenery. About twenty-five yards ahead 
of us loomed the German wire, when off to our 
right we saw twelve Germans advancing toward 
us. Flat upon our stomachs we went, and by 
gradual degrees worked ourselves into conven- 
ient shell-holes in the vicinity. 

By the best of good fortune, and it was only 
good fortune, the Germans had not seen us, and 
they passed within three feet of my head. 

After giving them ample time to put distance 
between us, we crawled up to the German barbed 
wire at a point which we judged would be in the 
vicinity of their advanced listening-post. Here 
we pulled out our wire-cutters and snipped a neat 
path through it to the sap-head at which our 
efforts were to be directed. 

As we came in front of it two close-clipped, 
blond heads bobbed leisurely about back of the 



RAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 197 

parapet, so we knev/ that our attack was as yet 
unannounced. At a predetermined signal we 
split up into parties of two. A pair of us went 
to the right of the parapet, two went to the left, 
and the officer and myself made for the sap-head 
itself. 

Of course we had no desire to repeat the expe- 
rience of our former raiding -party, when we had 
attracted the entire strength of the German 
machine-guns by the firing of a flare. This raid 
was to be as quiet and inconspicuous as we could 
possibly make it. Therefore, instead of taking 
our revolvers by the butt, we took them by the 
barrel and trusted to deliver a silent dispatch to 
any German who came our way. 

At a signal from the officer we plunged forward 
and did away with the Germans in the sap-head, 
making absolutely no noise. One of them re- 
ceived the butt of my revolver on the top of his 
head before he even knew that we were within 
fifty yards, and the other was strangled by the 
officer without so much as a peep out of him. 

Such luck seemed almost too good to be true, 
but we made the most of it, and the six of us 
dashed down the narrow sap-trench into an ad- 
vanced firing-trench which, fortunately for us, 
was not properly a part of the German line at 
this point. 



198 *^ LADIES FROM HELL'' 

Into this firing-trench we went at full speed, 
and on coming around a corner of it I ran head-on 
into a German peacefully puffing away at his pipe. 
Again the butt of my revolver came down just 
above his ear, and he collapsed with little more 
than a grunt. 

While I was finishing this little job to my per- 
sonal satisfaction, making sure that this particu- 
lar German would not return to haunt us, the rest 
of the fellows ran on and obtained a rather com- 
plete mental map of the surroundings. This 
finished, and our efforts still remaining undiscov- 
ered, we were emboldened to try for the lookouts 
in another sap-head. 

Two abreast, we dashed out toward it. We 
were only half way to the sap-head, when word 
somehow reached the German line that there was 
trouble out front. We could hear them coming 
up through the communication-trenches, and at 
the same time the entire German line burst into 
a roar of machine-gun racket that made the night 
sound like the interior of a boiler-shop. 

This was no time to try our skill on the Germans 
in the second listening-post. We hopped up over 
the parapet and endeavored to dash across to our 
own listening-posts as fast as our legs could carry 
us. But our progress was slow. As each flare 
hissed up into the sky, we had to fall flat or roll 



RAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 199 

into a convenient shell-hole. We had made scant 
progress in this way for the best part of a half 
hour, when MacFarland, who was with me, ex- 
claimed, ''My God, they We got me !'' and grasped 
his arm in an ecstasy of pain. 

I managed to get him behind a little rise of 
ground, where we discovered that his wound was 
hardly more than a flesh-wound in the arm, al- 
though extremely painful. I bound him up as 
besit I could, and we settled ourselves in an un- 
usually luxuriant shell-hole, hoping that the line 
would quiet down. 

By this time the entire sector had become thor- 
oughly aroused, and no-man 's-land was alive with 
everything from rifle-bullets to larger stuff. As 
we were discussing the matter and the prospects 
for our getting out alive, another of our fellows 
rolled into our shell-hole with a nasty wound in 
his chest. Later a fourth made his way into the 
same cover. Those of us who were still able to 
navigate volunteered to help get the wounded 
back to our line, but both of them refused all 
assistance and declared that it was up to every 
man to fend for himself as best he could. 

After waiting for fully an hour, the firing 
lulled a little. I stuck my head over the edge of 
the shell-hole to see how things looked. Not 
fifteen feet away I could see the outlines of the 



200 '^LADIES FROM HELL'' 

same working-party that had nearly found us on 
our journey up to the German trench earlier in 
the evening. 

By this time a driving rain had set in and the 
definite outlines of the party were not distinctly 
visible. Our wounded oflficer, however, found the 
opportunity too good to miss, and, raising himself 
on his elbow, he fired at the nearest German, 
whose appearance seemed to indicate that he, too, 
might be an officer. Evidently he got him, be- 
cause the German fell with a resounding flop and 
a tremendous curse. The rest of the party then 
seemed to disappear entirely, and we were just 
congratulating ourselves on bagging the officer 
when we found sudden cause to regret our impet- 
uosity. 

Evidently our officer's shot, flashing out from 
no-man 's land, had attracted the German gunners. 
After a lull of a minute or two they f ocussed their 
fire in our direction. ** Typewriter-fire ' ' is what 
we call it — ^fifty or sixty shots in one shell-hole 
and then fifty or sixty more in another, and so on 
until all the shell-holes in that vicinity have been 
searched out. But fortunately they failed to 
locate our particular hiding-place, protected as it 
was by a meager rise of ground, and toward morn- 
ing we were able to sneak back to our listening- 
post, where we reported to our colonel. 



RAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 201 

Four of the boys had **got theirs^' that night. 
None of the wounds were serious, however, though 
three of them were sufficient to send the victims 
to Blighty. The fourth had received a **cushey'' 
wound in the fleshy part of his leg, and a few 
weeks in one of the neighboring hospitals would 
bring him around 0. K. 

For the next two or three days nothing of any 
particular importance happened, and we went 
about our usual round of snipers' duties, but al- 
ways wifli the feeling that something was com- 
ing. The entire sector was extremely nervous, 
and the constant action of the neighboring French 
continued .to keep us on our toes. 

I remember how one morning — it was on a 
Wednesday — about two o'clock I was aroused 
by a particularly heavy bit of shelling, and I 
hastened from my quarters up to the front line 
to find out what the trouble might be. The shells 
were not directed at the front line, but at the bat- 
teries to the rear, and they seemed to be scream- 
ing overhead in a solid sheet. 

As 2 :30 drew near, we could hear them coming 
closer and closer. They seemed to h-ave shifted, 
and were now sweeping the communication- 
trenches just to the rear of the front line. 

At three o'clock came the usual ** stand-to" 
order, and every one jumped on the firing step, 



202 ** LADIES FROM HELL'' 

thoroughly convinced that a German attack was 
scheduled for the immediate future. From three 
to four o^clock we paced nervously up and down 
the trench, awaiting the signal from our listening- 
post. At four o'clock we heard the rattle of mus- 
ketry-fire out on our front, and immediately every 
one was on the alert. 

I hurriedly made my way to a little rise in the 
trench, while the rest of the snipers ran back to 
previously prepared positions about fifty yards 
to the rear, where they calculated on becoming a 
nasty menace to the Germans in our trench, should 
they succeed in getting into it. 

From my chosen vantage-point I could indis- 
tinctly see about two hundred and fifty yards in 
each direction, and the horizon within this radius 
gave the appearance of being alive. In the semi- 
misty darkness of early morning I could sense the 
Germans coming, although I could not see them 
with any degree of exactness. But as the min- 
utes passed, the horizon assumed a steadier posi- 
tion, and just under it I could see the Germans 
coming on at a slow trot, massed shoulder to 
shoulder as far as the eye could reach in either 
direction. 

Our boys held their fire until the oncoming line 
was plainly visible, and then we cut loose. Mean- 
while word had been telephoned to the artillery 



KAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 203 

to give us all the help they could, but in those 
days artillery help, at the most, was usually about 
ten or fifteen shells, so that it fell to us to seek 
our salvation through our rifle-sights. 

By this time the Germans were plainly visible, 
and individuals stood out and ceased to be merely 
a part and parcel of a moving, heaving line. On 
they came, until they were about thirty-five yards 
from our front line. By that time extra machine- 
guns had been brought up from the second-line 
trench, and we were letting them have the full 
benefit of two weeks of nervous waiting. 

Twenty-five yards away from us, and the full 
effect of our fire became apparent. There were 
huge gaps in the German line, and the closer they 
came, the wider grew the gaps. Another ten 
yards, and the result was in the balance. The 
Germans halted. At this psychological moment, 
by some stroke of fortune, we seemed able to di- 
rect an extra stream of fire at them, and they 
fell back to their own trenches. But at least two- 
thirds of them were left behind, out in no-man's- 
land. 

Following this, everything was quiet for fifteen 
or twenty minutes. But then, apparently in re- 
taliation for their defeat, the Germans started a 
heavy shelling of our front line. 

Ten of us were congregated in the trench at the 



204 ** LADIES FROM HELL'' 

mouth of two dugouts. One of these ran out 
under no-man's-land, while the other ran back 
toward the rear. I was standing at the mouth of 
the one that ran toward the rear and was dis- 
cussing the attack with four or five of the fellows 
who were with me. We could hear the German 
shells sweeping up and down about two hundred 
yards to our right. Then, little by little, they 
crept up toward us. One in advance of all the 
others hit about fifty yards to our left; then an- 
other — this time in direct line with us — ^hit some 
seventy-five yards to the rear. 

At this juncture my guardian angel came down 
and whispered in my ear, and for no reason what- 
ever I stepped over to the entrance of the dugout 
just opposite to the one at w^hich I had been stand- 
ing. I had hardly reached its doorway when 
there came a scream like an express-train in a 
tunnel, next a terrific flash that blotted out every- 
thing, and then I felt myself engulfed as by a 
mighty blanket which weighed down upon me with 
tons of weight. There was no pain, in fact, there 
was no active sensation at all. Everything 
seemed simply blotted out. 

When I came to, a sorry sight met my eye. 
The shell, almost grazing my head in its flight, 
had buried itself in the threshold of the dugout 
that I had just left. The force of the ensuing 



EAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 205 

explosion had catapulted the earth under my feet 
into the air, and with this earth went myself and 
the dugout in front of which I stood. The entire 
terrain thereabouts had come down upon ** yours 
truly,'* and the main beam of the dugout rested 
snugly in the small of my back. I was flat on my 
stomach, and my face was buried almost up to my 
eyes in mud. 

But at that I wasn't nearly as badly off as 
some of the other boys. The four who had been 
standing in the dugout opposite me had been en- 
tirely wiped out of existence. Within three feet 
of my head Porky Pete 's feet stuck out. The rest 
of him was buried under the debris which held me 
down. 

Even as I took this in, I became aware of ter- 
rific pain. It felt as though a great knife had 
ripped from the sole of my foot up to the nape of 
my neck. At intervals this died away entirely, 
and I became convinced that my entire body had 
been shot away. I remember wondering vaguely 
if a man could live without his body, and then all 
worry about my body ceased as I found that I 
was totally incapable of moving my arms. Imme- 
diately I conjured up terrible pictures of how I 
would look without my arms. 

Until daylight I lay there helpless. The Ger- 
mans continued a terrific shelling, and it would 



206 ''LADIES FROM HELL" 

have been utterly impossible for any of my com- 
rades to reach me. The entire trench had been 
destroyed. The parapet for several yards in 
either direction was gone, and any one attempting 
to rescue me would have faced certain death. 

At last, however, three of the fellows managed 
to dig a shallow trench, which partially covered 
them and enabled them to reach the collapsed dug- 
out. Fortunately for me, I was in a direct line 
with their trench, and by seven o'clock they had 
me out; but the rest of the poor devils who had 
been with me when the shell hit were not taken 
out until noon, or later, of the same day. Of the 
ten in that laughing group before the two dug- 
outs, only three of us remained alive. 

I was hurried from the dugout to a dressing- 
station slightly to the rear, where the medical 
officer told me that he thought I was good for 
Blighty. I had no notion of what was the matter 
with me. I was dazed from shell-shock, and per- 
sisted in believing that my entire body had been 
shot away and that only my head was being car- 
ried about. At intervals I found considerable 
amusement in observing myself in this sad pre- 
dicament. 

During a lucid interval I saw a chap next to 
me whose condition was infinitely worse than 
mine and whose fortunes were no better. He had 



RAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 207 

come over in one of the late drafts and had heen 
in a front-line trench but two hours when a shrap- 
nel, exploding near him, gave him a jagged wound 
and sent him back for a period of weeks. On his 
return he had been in the trench but a scant half- 
hour when another shrapnel picked him up, and 
this time he was pretty badly done up. 

With this fellow and three others who had '*got 
theirs'' during the attack or the bombardment, I 
was carried back through the communication- 
trench to a little Ford ambulance that chattered 
by the roadside. I happened to be placed on the 
bottom layer of stretchers. Just above me was a 
chap with his entire shoulder and head swathed 
in bandages. He must have been badly wounded, 
for the blood kept dripping down and hitting my 
stretcher just alongside my ear. Try as I would, 
I couldn't move my head, and all the way to Be- 
thune I heard this poor chap call for water and 
felt the constant tap-tap-tap of his blood beside 
me. 

In Bethune I was put to bed in a convent, await- 
ing further diagnosis by the physician in charge. 
On my right was a pale, wide-eyed chap, who from 
time to time reached under his mattress to pull 
out a tiny, tin tobacco-box from which he took a 
pinch of something. 

Believing it to be his duly prescribed medicine, 



208 *^ LADIES FROM HELL" 

I thought nothing of it. But as he continued his 
excursions under ^the mattress, I noticed that he 
endeavored to take his little dose without being 
observed by the orderlies or doctor. Medicine 
requires no such f-urtiveness. Immediately my 
suspicions were aroused. 

When the medical officer came up to him, he 
said: 

**Well, young fellow, what seems to be the 
trouble with youT' 

**I don't know, sir," replied the pale, wide- 
eyed individual, **but I think I have heart- 
failure. ' ' 

Thereupon the medical officer felt his pulse, 
listened to his heart, and passed on. 

The orderlies gossiped openly about the ter- 
rific pulse of this otherwise apparently normal 
young fellow. Somehow I could n 't help connect- 
ing his tin tobacco-box with his pulse, although I 
had no reason for doing so. 

Toward evening the M. O. in charge came in 
and made directly for this same young chap. But 
this time, instead of asking him what ailed him or 
how he felt, he lifted the mattress and pulled out 
the little tin box which had awakened my suspi- 
cions. Then, with a muttered oath and a dis- 
gusted look on his face, he turned to the orderly 
and said: 



EAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 209 

** Another one of those cordite-eaters! Send 
him along and give him two or three weeks of 
rest. Then back to the front for him!" 

Cordite is little more than gun-cotton, or nitro- 
glycerine in solid form, and of course is easily- 
obtainable near the front. It is likewise a very- 
active heart-stimulant, and as such I believe it is 
often given prior to or following operations. 
This wide-eyed young wiseacre, knowing this fact, 
had partaken liberally of the substance, and as a 
result his heart pounded like a twelve-cylinder 
motor. Such symptoms, however, are becoming 
well known to medical ofl&cers, and as a result 
* ^ heart failure ' ' on the front line is becoming con- 
siderably less prevalent than in the early days of 
the war. Cordite-eaters are given scant encour- 
agement, I may add. 

After the incident of the cordite-eater another 
load of wounded was brought in, and a Goorkha 
was put down at my left. Hardly had he arrived 
when my nostrils quivered under the most haunt- 
ingly familiar, yet unfamiliar, odor. What was 
it? Where was it? I could answer neither ques- 
tion. As the minutes dragged along, it became 
unbearable. I turned my head and scrutinized 
the Indian. Certainly he was dirty enough to 
create a stench, but not such a stench as this. At 
last I could stand it no longer. 



210 *' LADIES FROM HELL" 

*'What smells soT' I asked the Goorkha. 

His teeth gleamed, and in reply he shot out a 
mixture of English and native jargon. About all 
I could understand was a word that sounded 
strangely like ** souvenirs. " For half an hour I 
pondered. Souvenirs? Odor? I could see no 
connection between the two. 

In a fit of anger, I at length called the orderly. 
He agreed with me that no odor like that belonged 
in a hospital, and, like myself, he suspected the 
Indian. But in reply to his questions,, only an 
excited medley of impossible English was forth- 
coming. At last, in sheer desperation, I said, 
'*Look in his pack." 

The orderly opened it, and recoiled in horror. 
The Goorkha sat up, reached over, and pulled out 
a string of six or eight human ears, purloined 
from dead Germans. 

*' Souvenirs," he cackled delightedly. ** Sou- 
venirs ! ' ' 

I presume that his family back home would re- 
quire some physical proof of his prowess, and he, 
poor savage, inspired perhaps by his peep into the 
ways of enlightened kultur, thought that his 
string of awful ** souvenirs" would be his best 
and most modern answer to them. 

That evening the physician in charge, a major, 
and a captain came in to diagnose my case and 



RAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 211 

to settle my future disposition. They looked me 
over, but as yet I was unable to find out from 
them what ailed me. I heard them discussing my 
troubles, however, and gathered that they would 
not operate here, but that I would be passed on 
to Blighty. 

Immediately thereafter I was tagged and loaded 
into an ambulance which took me to Lillers, where 
we were pushed into a hospital-train bound for 
Boulogne. 

All this time I had been in a semi-dazed condi- 
tion from shell-shock. It was only at intervals 
that I seemed to regain my full and normal fac- 
ulties, but the hospital-train brought me to com- 
plete consciousness with a delightful shock. 

If there is anything wonderful in the world, it 
is a hospital-train. Here, for the first time since 
I had come to France, I rested snugly between 
sheets. And the springs! They were real 
springs that rode you comfortably, without jolt- 
ing, as the train bumped over frogs and crossings. 
Then there were nurses, every one of them a beau- 
tiful angel. The doctors, even though gruff and 
hurried, seemed like no ordinary mortals. It was 
the first time that I had not had to shift for my- 
self, and I thoroughly enjoyed the luxury of being 
wounded. 

The food was wonderful, too. I don't remem- 



212 *^ LADIES FROM HELL'' 

ber what we ate or how it was served, but I shall 
never taste food as good as I did upon that hos- 
pital-train. It all seemed like a dream at the 
time, and I remember wondering vaguely when I 
would awaken and find myself again in the front 
line. 

One of the nurses told me that we were bound 
for the train-head of a sector some distance out- 
side of Ypres. As we approached the town I 
could distinctly hear the heavy shelling which has 
damned Ypres since early in the war. Here we 
were switched about, and finally, after only a little 
delay, we were off for Boulogne. 

At Boulogne hosts of ambulances met us, and 
as mine was adjudged a serious case, I was de- 
spatched to the hospital at Wimereux. This 
hospital, however, was full to overflowing, and 
we new arrivals were placed in tents. These 
were huge aifairs, almost as large as your circus- 
tents. Here heaven itself reached down to us 
again. It was early evening, and we went 
through the luxury of a real bath, with warm 
water and soap. Immediately following the bath, 
I drowsed off. My cot happened to be near the 
door, and as the orderlies and nurses went back 
and forth constantly, I found it hard to sink into 
real, solid slumber. 

At last, through the exercise of will power, I 




One of our guardian angels 



EAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 213 

did drop off completely, and immediately I was in 
the front line wrestling with a husky German. 
Through the darkness came a woman's voice. It 
was urging me to stop, and I felt strong hands 
upon my shoulder. I hung on to the German for 
dear life, and endeavored to plant my teeth in his 
leg. But still that woman 's voice kept coming out 
of the dark at me. It bothered me. It didn't 
belong; it was incongruous; and I awakened to 
find myself on the floor, with both arms wrapped 
around the leg of an orderly and my teeth buried 
in the flap of his trousers. Even in my sleep I 
still fought Germans, and I believe that my jaws 
would have been locked in that orderly 's trousers 
to this day, had not the strange voice of a nurse 
awakened me. 

My nurse was a veteran of the Boer War, and 
when I told her that I was a member of the Lon- 
don Scottish, she took an extra interest in me and 
told me that she would see if she could n't get me 
home to Blighty. The following morning they 
held a consultation over me, and I discovered for 
the first time that there was a kink or a jolt or 
something the matter with my spinal cord, which 
affected my right leg. It was considerable of a 
comfort to know that I had something definitely 
the matter with me. 

After the conference an orderly brought all my 



214 '^LADIES FROM HELL" 

stuff to the side of my cot and broke the news to 
me that I was bound for Blighty. I was loaded 
into an ambulance and moved to the wharf, where 
a white hospital-ship was being rapidly loaded 
with hundreds of similar inert shapes on 
stretchers. 

Still it all seemed like a dream to me. The 
transfer from the tense excitement of fighting to 
the intense, almost oppressive quiet of a hospital- 
ship seemed absolutely unreal. I actually kept 
pinching myself in an endeavor to prove it all, 
and all at once, either a dream or a reality. 

The bed with a mattress and springs, dozens of 
nurses, the smell of the water, and the inevitable 
noises of a dock helped to bring me around to a 
full realization that at last I was bound for 
Blighty and for home. 

I had just inhaled a breath of true exaltation 
when the grim specter, Worry, again reached out 
after me. Suppose the Huns should pick this 
hospital-ship as a target for one of their torpe- 
does! I dreaded to think of starting at all, and 
seriously contemplated a request to be returned 
to some hospital in France. While I was con- 
sidering the advisability of so doing, the screw 
began to churn and I resigned myself to my fate. 
My mind was fully made up that mine was to be a 
watery grave. Almost in tears, I confided to the 



EAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 215 

nurae that I could not swim. She laughing^ly 
assured me that there would be no occasion for 
such an accomplishment. 

That night I counted each revolution of the 
screw. Every time that it hesitated or spun out 
of the water in one of the huge channel-seas I was 
thoroughly convinced that we were taking our last 
plunge for Davy Jones' locker. Not a dram of 
sleep passed my eyes, and I refused to believe 
myself safe until I heard the nurse say that South- 
ampton was only ten minutes away. 

Here we were again loaded on stretchers, and 
as I came down the gang-plank, feet first, I saw 
the most beautiful sight that ever greeted the eyes 
of man. It was home ! It was the Southampton 
that I knew in real life! Those spires were no 
mirage ; those taxicabs were real ; the horses were 
not drawing artillery caissons. 

Stretched out before me in long rows were am- 
bulances by the hundreds, apparently, and what 
looked like thousands of stretcher-bearers 
marched in endless trains to and from the ship. 
In the background were six or eight hospital- 
trains and, earnestly desiring to be put in a hos- 
pital as near home as possible, I called to one of 
the officers, who was in charge of the loading of 
the trains. I told him a sad tale of woe, but he 
neatly and curtly informed me that I ought to be 



216 '^LADIES FEOM HELL'' 

thankful to be home at all, and that I should not 
be so forward as to attempt to pick my own hos- 
pital. 

But perhaps his bark was worse than his bite, 
for I was loaded on a train bound for the hospital 
that I most desired, the one at Cardiff. 

Three hours later we were unloaded from the 
train under the eyes of half the town. Cheer 
after cheer was given, and we were packed into 
ambulances which rolled with wonderful smooth- 
ness to the immense hospital. 

Here my uniform was removed, and in its place 
I received the usual blue hospital-uniform and a 
*^ nighty.'' I hated to see my Scottish kilts leave 
me, and, although it was strictly contrary to 
orders, my nurse was kind enough to rescue them 
and preserve them for me until my release. 

Soon after our arrival Major Brooks, who was 
one of the foremost surgeons in England, came in, 
looked me over, and told me that he would oper- 
ate on the following Wednesday. I asked the 
nurse to wire my mother. She arrived on Mon- 
day. 

As I saw her coming through the door, I knew 
for a surety that I was really at home. Then I 
knew that it was all over, at least for the time. 
My mother was extremely brave. I do not know 
whether she knew the seriousness of my injury, 



RAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 217 

but she gave no outward signs of worry. With 
both arms clasped around me, she kissed me re- 
peatedly, and I, baby that I was, broke down and 
cried like a three-year-old, while she did her 
utmost to comfort me. 

Next to my bed stood that of a poor chap named 
Gilroy. My mother immediately made friends 
with Mrs. Gilroy. The mothers or wives of all 
the seriously wounded are permitted to spend the 
entire day with them. All of Cardiff ^s homes 
have become boarding-houses for the duration of 
the war, and the hospital kept a complete list of 
these boarding-houses and constantly referred the 
relatives of patients to them. 

These houses, although they are not in any way 
under government control, make no attempt what- 
ever to profit from the misfortunes of their 
boarders. Their prices are moderate, and all the 
comforts of home-life are extended to the men 
and women who stay therein. 

In comparison with Gilroy, I was the luckiest 
of men. Poor fellow, he had it right. A shrap- 
nel bullet had penetrated just below his eye, to 
come out at the back of his neck, and he was one 
of the seven wonders of the hospital world at that 
time. But he seemed to be in the best of spirits, 
although constantly living under the great shadow. 
When I arrived he had already been operated 



218 ** LADIES FROM HELL'' 

upon ^ve times, and both his nostrils and his 
throat were plugged. He fed and breathed 
through silver tubes, and to laugh was tempting 
death. 

Although our ward was devoted to the seri- 
ously wounded cases, there was considerable mer- 
riment, and as we grew accustomed to the luxury 
of illness, we fell back upon our old habit of 
grousing. The orderlies were a fruitful field for 
our criticism. They were never there when most 
wanted. They were usually out in the courtyard 
shooting craps. 

I remember how one day, when one of the boys 
down the room had shouted a particularly laugh- 
able jest at a departing orderly, a jest that seemed 
to tickle Gilroy immensely, he laughed as best a 
man can laugh who has a silver tube for a throat. 
Then he stopped suddenly and became white as a 
sheet. 

**It 's coming on again,'' he mumbled, and all 
of us boys began calling at once for nurses and 
orderlies, for we knew that poor Gilroy was in 
the process of having a hemorrhage. 

The nurses came running, and the red screens 
that stood for danger-signals were drawn around 
poor Gilroy 's bed. Nurses and doctors hurried 
to and fro. None of us slept that night, despite 
orders to lie back and forget it all. It was not 



EAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 219 

until morning that I myself dropped off. When 
I awoke, my first question was for Gilroy. 

*^0h, he ^s all right/* the nurse told me. 
*'They expected to take him to the morgue last 
night, but they didn't have to.'' 

Poor Gilroy seemed to have as many lives as 
the proverbial cat. I last heard from him about 
a year ago. He had survived nine operations and 
had lived two years, despite all the Germans had 
done to wipe him out. 

Wednesday, the day set for my operation, 
came around swiftly enough. I was all dressed 
up like an Egyptian mummy and carried down to 
a big white room that was directly underneath our 
ward. The smell of ether was no stranger to me. 
Indeed, it floated up from the operating-room into 
our windows and constantly made us drowsy. 

The operating-room might have been a factory 
in full blast, so swiftly were they rolling men in 
and out. One chap came out singing, **It 's a 
Hot Time in the Old Town To-night." He had 
lost a leg about three minutes before. Another 
one kept shouting something about **the damned 
Germans," and all the way down the corridor we 
could hear him cursing the Germans and every- 
thing Teutonic. 

Amid such encouraging scenes I was wheeled in, 
transferred to the operating table, and strapped 



220 *^ LADIES FROM HELL" 

down. Then some sunlight, filtering through a 
window, struck a neat case of knives. The order- 
lies were polishing and sterilizing them. They 
glistened like no knives that I have ever seen be- 
fore or since. I didn't have much time to con- 
template them, however, for a chap with nothing 
but eyes clapped the ether-cone over my head and 
told me to do the impossible — breathe naturally. 

I took three or four breaths, choked, took an- 
other and a deeper breath, and once again I was 
at the front, fighting the Germans in a hand-to- 
hand conflict in no-man's-land. 

That night about ten o'clock I regained con- 
sciousness. I would have borne up bravely under 
the pain, had not the nurse, in a moment of f orget- 
fulness, told me that I could have a nice chicken 
dinner the next day. After an anesthetic, even a 
chicken dinner is not alluring. The mere thought 
of food proved the straw to break my stomach's 
back, and for the next two or three hours I went 
through all the throes of hospital nausea. 

I shall not attempt to describe the pain and 
nervous exhaustion that followed my operation. 
My operation would be of no interest to you, and 
your operation would be of no interest to me, al- 
though I am thoroughly convinced that my opera- 
tion and everything that followed it was the most 
interesting operation in the world. 



EAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 221 

I found, on discussing operations with other 
chaps in the hospital, that no one agreed as to the 
most dangerous variety or the most aggravating 
or most painful. One chap had had three toes re- 
moved on account of ** trench-foot, " and he was 
loud in his protestations that the removal of three 
toes was a terrific operation and unquestionably 
the most interesting amputation in the category 
of medical science. Poor Gilroy, who probably 
could speak with more knowledge than any one 
else, merely smiled a wan, feeble smile and gur- 
gled something like **Wait until you have gone 
through five of them, and then you can talk ! ' ' 

For many long weeks I was forced to lie with 
my leg in a little coop, much like some petted pup. 
Occasionally they let me up on crutches, to wander 
about like a lost soul. Whenever I went out to 
get any air or sunshine, I was placed on a wheeled 
table. 

One of the blessings of an English hospital is 
the weekly concert. I remember one of these par- 
ticularly well, for Phyllis Dare, the soprano, was 
scheduled, and I happened to have known her very 
well in London. 

All of the chaps who were able to stand it, were 
wheeled out on the lawn, and I rested alongside of 
a poor fellow whose arms and legs were both gone. 
We were in the front row. He was to give her a 



222 *^ LADIES FROM HELL'' 

bouquet, as a token of the hospital's appreciation 
of her entertainment. 

A sadder sight I have never seen. Miss Dare 
finished her part of the program and walked 
over to the chap who was to present her with the 
flowers. She took them off his chest, bent down 
and kissed him, smiled, and then, womanlike, burst 
into a flood of tears, running away behind a clump 
of bushes to hide her confusion. 

But, on the whole, such concerts did much to 
cheer the fellows and to make the endless weeks 
of routine in the hospital a little more bearable. 

That night, however, the cheering effect of the 
concert was blasted by the departure of old 
*^ Shaggy" Grimes. ** Shaggy" was a street- 
urchin in his early days, and to the end he re- 
mained one of the wittiest soldiers I have ever 
known. He seemed possessed of an indomitable 
pluck. A shell had shattered his shoulder, and 
gangrene had set in. They had taken his arm off 
at the elbow first, and then at the shoulder. 
Finally they had given him up as hopeless. But 
*^ Shaggy" bore up under it with remarkable for- 
titude. 

Day by day he grew weaker and weaker, until 
he was too far gone to go out and hear the concert 
of Miss Dare. When they wheeled us back into 
the ward, *^ Shaggy" was lying half -propped up 



EAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 223 

on pillows and vaguely whistling an indetermi- 
nate tune to himself. In answer to our chaffing 
he replied not a word, but continued this endless, 
tuneless tune. Suddenly he stopped, braced him- 
self in the bed, and called for a cigarette. It was 
immediately forthcoming. Somehow we sus- 
pected that *' Shaggy" was on the last lap of his 
journey to the Great Beyond. He finished the 
cigarette, carefully brushed the ashes from his 
fingers, and then called out: 

** Fellows, I 'm going; and I 'm going fast." 

The next morning '* Shaggy 's" bed was empty. 
*^ Shaggy" had gone west. 

'^Visitors' Day" was another punctuation in 
the hospital sentence. Our ward was particularly 
fortunate on these days, because we had a number 
of **arm cases." **Arm cases" are chaps who 
have their legs and so can walk. It is their duty 
on ** Visitors' Day" to straggle out into the cor- 
ridor, look lonesome, and corral any and all pos- 
sible visitors. The richer a ward is in **arm 
cases," the greater the number of ** solicitors" it 
is likely to have in corridors, and the greater the 
number of visitors it is assured of having. 

Our visitors were almost always complete 
strangers to us, although usually there were about 
fifty per cent, of them who came every ** Visitors' 
Day, ' ' and so became familiar to us. There were 



224 ^^ LADIES FROM HELL^' 

poor people and rich people, and they all brought 
their little gifts and delicacies for their wounded 
soldiers. 

Different ones would pick out certain soldiers 
and thereafter focus their attentions on them to 
the exclusion of all others. A little six-year-old 
girl picked me out and called me her **beau." 
She used to bring me magazines and newspapers, 
and, although she could hardly spell a word, she 
endeavored to * ^ read " to me by the hour. At first 
it was excruciatingly funny, but it grew monoto- 
nous as the poor child spelled out word after 
word, so slowly that I entirely lost the context of 
a sentence before she half -finished it. 

I have often had people ask me if the battle- 
front does not make God seem a nearer, more per- 
sonal being. Be that as it may, I do know that 
Communion in a hospital is one of the most im- 
pressive sights I have ever witnessed. It is not 
uncommon to see either a priest or a minister giv- 
ing Communion to the wounded. The little red 
screens would be drawn about the bed, and some- 
how it did not seem at all out of place. Chaps, 
who in their former life would rather lose a finger 
than admit that they ever went to church, saw 
nothing amiss in taking Communion in view of 
the entire ward. 

I remember how one Sunday morning the Rev- 



EAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 225 

erend Bailey came in, and how he held Communion 
for us, while my mother knelt by my bedside. I 
wept as only a wounded soldier can weep when 
he finds himself through it all, done and com- 
pletely finished. Yes, the battle-front, though it 
be near hell itself, is mighty close to God. 

I might continue on indefinitely with detailed 
descriptions of hospital life, of its sad and humor- 
ous sides, for it has many of both. But, at best, 
hospitals are good things to forget; hence I will 
pass on and over the monotonous weeks of con- 
valescence, until I was transferred to light duties 
in London. 

I had read of Zeppelin attacks in the London 
papers, but I hardly thought that my first visit 
to London after my return from the front would 
be signalized by Herr Zeppelin and his doughty 
cohorts. 

I had just left the train at the depot and had 
taken the 'bus. It was about ten o 'clock at night. 
Suddenly, as I was passing the War Office, the 
anti-aircraft gun on the roof crashed out into the 
night, and far up in the sky I could hear that fa- 
miliar, thrice-repeated plop of distantly exploding 
shrapnel. 

Simultaneously with the explosion, myriads of 
search-lights shot up into the night and wavered 



226 ''LADIES FROM HELL" 

back and forth like long, lean, accusing fingers. 
Gradually they converged, and five of them at 
once focused on a great sausage-like object, which, 
under the blast of light, became illuminated until 
it shone like silver. 

In a great curve the Zeppelin swung over Lon- 
don. I alighted from the 'bus at the Nelson Mon- 
ument, the better to observe the raid. No one 
seemed particularly frightened. Perhaps we 
would have been if we had known how close we 
were to the danger-point. I had hardly been at 
the base of the monument for more than three 
minutes when there came a terrific explosion and 
a rush of air from about one hundred yards to my 
right. With the crash came a jet of blue flame 
that seemed to leap almost as high as the Zeppe- 
lin. They had dropped an incendiary bomb which 
had set off the gas-main, and only the ready action 
of the London fire-department saved the city from 
a nasty conflagration at this time. 

After a shivering half-hour of expectation, the 
horrible failed to happen and the raid was re- 
ported to be over. As usual, little or no military 
damage had been done, and London settled back 
into the humdrum harness of its usual tasks. 

After serving for some time in the lighter jobs 
libout headquarters, I was finally given my dis- 



RAIDING A GERMAN TRENCH 227 
charge, as it soon became apparent that I could 
not stand either long marches or much standing, 
owing to a badly injured tendon in my foot and 
calf. And so, on January 21, 1916, I embarked 
for America. 



CHAPTER X 

WHO WILL WIN THE WAR — ^AND HOW 

1 ARRIVED in America some little time before 
your country entered the war. 

During the past year or more, as an ex-soldier, 
I have been called upon to travel about consider- 
ably, and have had an opportunity to talk with 
many and to observe widely. With the battle- 
front ever fresh in my mind, I cannot help con- 
trasting militant America with war-time London. 

In the course of my travels I am asked the same 
old question a dozen times a day. It is always 
this: 

''When will the war stop, and how will it stopT' 

Here are really two questions which only a fool 
would pretend to answer. Anything that I may 
say will be only my personal opinion, and my only 
authority will be my experience on the firing-line 
and my close intimacy with America and her 
people. 

There is not one iota of doubt in my mind as to 
who will win this war. There was no doubt in my 
mind as to the ultimate winner from the moment 

228 



WHO WILL WIN THE WAR 229 

that the news flashed back to London of the won- 
derful stand taken by our London Scottish on 
Hallowe'en Night. Ultimately the Allies — and 
you are one of us — will win, and it will be no 
** Peace without Victory/* 

Immediately the pessimists — we need pessi- 
mists in order to keep our proper mental bal- 
ance — will arise and sketch a picture something 
after this fashion : 

** Germany is to-day the winner. Territorially 
she has gained twice, yes, thrice as much as was 
originally called for by her ambitious program 
of militarism. To-day Germany controls a vast 
and fertile territory which is far preferable to 
her and far more precious than her malaria-ridden 
colonies in Africa and elsewhere.'' 

Yes, I will agree that to-day Germany is a win- 
ner in so far as territorial aggrandizement is con- 
cerned. But the war has only begun. It has only 
passed through the first two of its three phases. 
Back when I knew the smell of smoke and powder 
we were nearing the end of the first phase, the 
phase of retreat, of ** strategical retreat" made 
famous and ludicrous by Hindenburg. During 
this period England and France were gather- 
ing their forces and were exercising their muscles 
in preparation for the struggle to come. 

Then came the second phase, when these new- 



230 ** LADIES FROM HELL'' 

found muscles tightened and the line held, and 
Germany stopped advancing. We are now in the 
last stages of the second phase. We now know 
that those bands of men and steel which surround 
Germany can hold her indefinitely, forever, if 
necessary. 

The third and final stage of the war is approach- 
ing, when the strength which we have been build- 
ing up during these years will be expended in a 
mighty spring that will stop little short of Berlin 
itself. 

This third stage may continue as long or longer 
than the first two stages combined, but it is near, 
and Germany knows it is near. 

I have said that I knew the ultimate winner 
from the beginning. I knew it far better after I 
had fought the German and tested his spirit. 
What wins a war? It is the spirit of the fighter, 
reinforced by the spirit of the people back home 
and by the mechanical aids of your munition fac- 
tories. The German fighter is lacking in this 
spirit. 

Do not misunderstand me. The German is a 
splendid, a tremendous fighter, but only when he 
is fighting en masse. Individually, he is a coward 
at heart, and has none of the righteous anger be- 
hind him that inspires the Allied soldiers. He 
fights because he is ordered to fight, because he 



WHO WILL WIN THE WAR 231 

will face certain death if he does not fight. His 
arm is not steeled by the cry of humanity nor by 
the cries of murdered women and children. 

It is because the German does not fight for the 
love of righteous fighting, but because he is or- 
dered to fight, that I know we Allies will win. It 
is not in the book that the Germans shall come out 
victorious. It was not in the book when a mere 
handful of British stood off the German hosts at 
the Battle of Mons. 

The ultimate victor in this war was forecast 
when the French forced back the German hordes 
at the Mame. When the Germans made their 
drive on Calais and failed, the victor of this strug- 
gle was again foretold. When the Belgian ports 
failed to fall into German hands through Ypres, 
the ultimate victor was once more prophesied. 

Germany's early drive through Russia failed; 
at Verdun she failed ; in Italy she failed. Always 
she falls short. And why? 

Germany to-day fights as a machine, and ma- 
chines have their limitations. Germany's sol- 
diers fight as machines. There is none of the 
spirit in the German soldier to drive him on 
against tremendous odds. Had there been this 
spirit at the Marne, at the Mons, at Verdun, or 
at Calais, Germany would have been the vic- 
tor to-day, and England, France, Italy, and 



232 ^^ LADIES FROM HELL" 

America, too, would at this moment be out- 
stretched in prayer before the feet of Wilhelm der 
Grosse. 

Germany to-day is in a steel cage, and the bars 
are slowly closing round her, as did the walls of 
Poe ^s horrid chamber. Behind those walls, push- 
ing them closer and closer, stand the upraised 
hands of all civilized humanity. These hands are 
steeled by necessity, for, should the Germans win 
by fluke or otherwise, the world from that day 
forward would become a tool, an abased tool, of 
German treachery and bribe. 

The civilized world, whether or not it has for- 
mally enlisted on the side of the Allies, realizes 
this to-day. England must fight on, because, 
should she stop and should Germany become the 
ultimate victor, England's sea-power would be 
taken away. With it would go England. Com- 
mercially, she would be subjected to the point of 
extinction. France is steeled by dire necessity, 
for, should Germany win, there would be no more 
France. 

And you Americans? Why will you fight on 
and on when your time comes, as we are now 
fighting? Because, should Germany win, you 
know as well as I where her greedy eyes would 
gaze. She does not want crowded England. She 
would be amply repaid, were England merely 



WHO WILL WIN THE WAR 233 

forced to pay tribute to her iron lieel of the future. 
Germany wants a place in which she may expand, 
where her people may grow and grow, until by 
sheer force of numbers der Deutschland covers 
the earth. She cannot grow in England. There 
is none too much space in France or in any sunny 
spot in Europe. But no one knows better than 
you the colossal opportunities for growth and 
advancement in your own America. 

South America, by evasion of the Monroe Doc- 
trine, has already become thoroughly Germanized 
commercially and to a large extent educationally. 
Germany can absorb South America without South 
America becoming cognizant of the fact. Until 
this war and the resultant hatred which it en- 
gendered, Germany could foresee in the near fu- 
ture the domination, the absorption of South 
America practically, if not politically. 

The only spot remaining on this earth worth 
the seeking is your own land, and you may rest 
assured that, should Germany win the war, it will 
be at your fertile fields and teeming cities that the 
kaiser will point his Judas 's finger. 

Of course you know all this. I have merely 
been rehearsing an old, old story. But you do 
not realize it in its full truth and strength. Like 
the descriptions of a city in your geography of 
school-days, it is nothing but black type. It lacks 



234 ^* LADIES FROM HELL" 

the life and truth which an actual visit to that 
city would bring. Some day, perhaps, when your 
first casualties come across to you in terrific num- 
bers, when war reaches its hand into your home 
and your neighbor's home, perhaps then you will 
realize the full truth of what I have been saying 
and the possibilities that await you should Ger- 
many prove the ultimate victor. Only when you 
realize this will America be in the war as Eng- 
land is, as France is, as Italy is — in the war until 
our soldiers address their mail, *^ Somewhere in 
Germany. ' ' 

Who will win the war? 

Let me answer the question in this way. Place 
yourselves in the grandstand of a race-course. 
Before you stretch two tracks, one smooth and 
straight, the other tortuous, filled with rubbish 
and debris, cross-hatched with ditches. On the 
smooth track runs a sleek horse, trained to the 
last minute, with a handicap of a quarter of a 
mile in its favor. That horse is Germany. On 
the other track runs a black horse, driven by an 
amateur. At the start the dark horse is a quarter 
of a mile behind its sleek antagonist, but grad- 
ually, despite the disadvantages, it decreases the 
distance between itself and its competitor until 
at the half-mile post the horses are neck and neck. 
Which is the better horse? 



WHO WILL WIN THE WAR 235 

Germany, with forty years of preparation and 
training, after four years of war finds herself 
only neck and neck with her amateur antagonist 
who is running the race amid the pitfalls and 
perils of the struggle itself. Under these con- 
ditions which is the better horse, the one with 
forty years of training or the dark horse, driven 
by an amateur, who has equaled the record of its 
antagonist at only the half-mile post? Which is 
the better horse, and on which horse will you place 
your money? 

It is because we Allies are beating Germany at 
her own game, despite untold difficulties in our 
path, that I unquestionably predict the ultimate 
victory of the Allied armies. This victory will 
come through no collapse of the German nation. 
Ultimate victory will be won, in all probability, by 
sheer force of arms. 

Germany to-day is surrounded by her armies, 
concreted into trenches that stretch for miles and 
miles behind her front line. We will have to blast 
them back, sometimes inch by inch. 

To-day, so I am reliably informed, there is a 
gun — and by this I do not mean a rifle, but a 
machine-gun or one of larger caliber — every nine 
feet along the Allied front. Before this war can 
be won these mouths of steel must lock their 
wheels and stretch from Calais almost to Con- 



236 ** LADIES FEOM HELL" 

stantinople, a solid line of protest against the 
dream of Attila. 

All this will take time. All this will take am- 
munition in abundance. To guide and direct the 
fire of this steel-tongued line will take the aid of 
hundreds, yes, hundreds of thousands of aero- 
planes. To build them and to train the aviators 
will take time. To build up reserve stores of 
ammunition, fitted for days and weeks of solid 
shelling, will take time. 

But in the meantime Germany is growing 
weaker. Father Time is on the side of the Allies. 
Meanwhile Germany is the losing winner. She 
cannot advance, and she faces an ultimate defeat 
as slow, but as certain, as death itself. 

Her submarine, which she has held up to her 
believing and gullible populace, will shortly gasp 
out its last flickering breath of life. It may cling 
to existence tenaciously, it may linger on indefi- 
nitely, but its weight in the scales of victory will 
become ever more negligible. Germany ^s subma- 
rine hopes were built on a false conception. At 
first she thought that by torpedoing ships she 
would frighten the seamen from their duty. In 
this belief she erred. Then by sinking sperlos 
versinkt, or ^^ without leaving any trace,'' she 
thought to reinforce the horror of her submarine 
and to inspire in all seafaring men such a terror 



WHO WILL WIN THE WAR 237 

of her '*frightfulness'' that they would refuse to 
man the ships. England would thus be starved, 
and America would be cut off from all participa- 
tion in the war. In this belief she likewise erred, 
but not without extending **frightfulness'' to its 
uttermost limits. 

Can you Americans imagine anything more hor- 
rible than sinking a peaceful, neutral ship laden 
with inoffensive men and women? Germans can. 
They can sink such a ship, and then the subma- 
rine commander can climb out upon his little con- 
ning-tower and direct the life-boats to gather to- 
gether and to link themselves with rope, so that 
he may the better * * tow them nearer land. ' ' Then 
the German submarine commander can tie one end 
of this hawser to his damnable craft and submerge 
for fifty or one hundred feet, towing the entire 
company down to an icy depth below the billows 
of the North Sea. 

But even this hell-born program failed, and 
to-day the submarine is gasping out its life. It 
is proving merely a tonic to recruiting in Eng- 
land and in your country. It is proving a boom- 
erang to Germany. It has aroused the world 
against Germany as nothing else could, and it will 
ultimately go the way of the Zeppelin, a proven 
failure so far as military effectiveness is con- 
cerned. 



238 ''LADIES FROM HELL'' 

There are those who would like to see the end of 
this war come quickly through a Germany starved 
into subjection.. I, too, would like to hold out 
this hope, but I cannot. Germany to-day has un- 
der cultivation, with truly Teutonic eflSciency, a 
tremendous acreage of land. This is being culti- 
vated by her womenfolk, whom she has trained 
through generations of hard labor to withstand 
the rigors of agricultural work. Her transporta- 
tion facilities, while somewhat weakened by the 
enormous strain of war, are still able to carry 
sufficient sustenance to keep her people breathing 
and working. Germany can, and probably will, 
fight on until her people realize the utter idiocy 
of it all. 

But will they ever realize it? That brings to 
mind the eternal question, ''Will Germany become 
a democracy? *' I believe that she will, but not 
until this war is over. The force that will de- 
mocratize Germany will be the flash of bayonets 
in Berlin, Allied bayonets. You need not look 
for an insurrection in Germany until that hour. 

To-day the German people are doped with a 
hypodermic of egotism. They have no more idea 
of their losses than has a native of the Fiji Isles. 
No black clothing or crape is permitted to be 
worn in Germany, for the wearing thereof would 
disclose the losses, and the Teuton War Office 



WHO WILL WIN THE WAR 239 

does not care to have the people know how heav- 
ily they are suffering. 

Germany does not publish a list of her dead 
and wounded. If you have a relative or a friend 
in the German army, you must go to a *' bureau'* 
and inquire privately to ascertain his fate. The 
aborted brain which planned this war took good 
care to see that its cost should be hidden from the 
people. And not its cost in men alone, but in 
money, likewise, for the German system of financ- 
ing this war is based on a clear scheme of robbing 
Peter to pay Paul, and then robbing Paul to pay 
Peter back again. Both robberies are accom- 
plished with the utmost skill and despatch, so 
that the victim never realizes it and remains 
dreaming as pleasantly as the Chinese opium 
smoker. 

You need look for no insurrection in Germany, 
because the German people do not know what is 
happening to-day. My sister was governess to 
the children of Count von Biilow. She was in Ger- 
many until six months after the declaration of 
war, and when she returned she was tremendously 
surprised to see that London was not a mass of 
ashes. She was also agreeably shocked to learn 
that the English fleet had not been wiped out, as 
she and the German people had been led to sup- 
pose. 



240 ^* LADIES FROM HELL" 

Germans to-day believe that they are the un- 
questioned victors, and they cannot understand 
why the Allies persist so eternally. Can you 
blame them, when they think that London is gone, 
that the British fleet is vanquished, that England 
is subjected? 

When my own kith and kin believed these things 
after only a few months in Germany, what must 
the true native-born German believe, who has fed 
upon this Teuton camouflage since babyhood? 

Furthermore, there is no one within the German 
Empire to start an insurrection. Bare hands can- 
not push back bayonets, and as long as the Teu- 
ton army remains loyal through habit or terror, 
so long will Germnay remain an autocracy. 

Germany combats disloyalty in her army by 
shifting troops back and forth so rapidly from 
one front to another that no spirit of dissension 
has a chance to spring up and thrive. Any spo- 
radic mutinies are but chance happenings, and I 
am frank to admit that they might occur in almost 
any army or navy, except one whose men fight not 
for a fetish of militarism, but for a great, good, 
and just cause. 

But when the German army discovers that Lon- 
don is not a smouldering heap of ashes, that the 
English fleet is not covered with barnacles at the 
bottom of the North Sea, that the band of steel 



WHO WILL WIN THE WAR 241 

which now surrounds them has tightened until 
their own cities are at stake, they will at the same 
time awaken to the fact that they have been 
drugged and misguided by a self-seeking aris- 
tocracy. Then Germany, all Germany, will turn 
like wolves at bay, and democracy will replace 
autocracy, perhaps with the suddenness and en- 
thusiasm that characterized the same change in 
Russia. 

In the meantime, with all due respect to your 
President, I would like to take issue with his state- 
ment that we are fighting not the German people, 
but the German ruling class. Permit me to use 
a homely simile and to ask a homely question. If 
you were walking down a street and a dog ran out 
to bite you, and did bite you, would you vent your 
spleen solely on the owner of the dog, or would 
you turn your hatred on the dog itself? 

The German people to-day are the dogs, and 
they are playing the part of the dog. It is the 
frightfulness of the people that kills us. It may 
have been conceived in the Wilhelmstrasse or 
among the pleasant forests of the kaiser ^s own 
preserves, but, mark you, it is the German people 
who perpetrate the atrocities. It is the common, 
middle-class women of Germany who delight in 
holding a cup of water to the parched lips of a 
wounded Ally soldier, only to dash it away and 



242 * 'LADIES FROM HELL" 

spit in his face in derision. It is the German 
people who cut our soldiers^ throats from ear to 
ear and who give no mercy, though they beg for 
it so vehemently when cornered. 

Our problem to-day may be to wipe out German 
autocracy, but the only way to do it is to march 
straight through solid columns of autocracy-drunk 
troops, the German people, sodden with years of 
training under German propaganda. 

My experience in the trenches would indicate 
that we need worry little about Kaiser Wilhelm 
or his sons. They are safe, far to the rear. It 
is the people of Germany who gave me my wound, 
and it is the people whom we must first extermi- 
nate before junkerdom will fall. 

Only because the Germans have proven them- 
selves such willing victims of the propaganda of 
the Wilhehnstrasse can you blame them. Even 
here in America, in your own United States, you 
see the willingness of some Germans to lay aside 
all rules of war and love in their mad efforts to 
further the progress of autocracy. You hear a 
great deal about pro-Germans in your country to- 
day, and you worry much about them. Person- 
ally, I feel sorry for any man who may rightly 
be called a pro-German. 

The pro-German to-day is a man without a coun- 
try. In your land he is detested, and in Germany 



WHO WILL WIN THE WAR 243 

he is hated with a hatred that knows no bounds, 
for he failed to deliver your country, bound hand 
and foot, into the outstretched palms of the kaiser. 
The pro-German failed to give Germany sufficient 
funds with which to carry on the war. Not only 
that, but there are other crimes laid against him. 
He failed to enlist in the German army, as he 
should have done, and he failed to send his sons 
to enlist. Then, last and most terrible of all, he 
failed to split your United States asunder. All 
this he should have done, had he been a true Ger- 
man. But he proved false to his trust, and, like 
Judas of old, he is hated for his falsity by every 
true German. 

Therefore, the man who calls himself a pro- 
German is a fool. He is not wanted in any civil- 
ized land to-day. When this war is over there 
will be no land big enough to hold him. His own 
country will disown him, and every other country 
on the face of the globe will brand him with the 
mark of Cain. The pro-German of to-day had 
best get on the winning side, not only openly and 
in public, but in his own chamber as well. If 
for no other reason than a selfish one, he will find 
it wise to align himself with the forces of de- 
mocracy. 

I have said that we Allies will win the war. 
Let me carry that one step farther. Every build- 



244 '^LADIES FEOM HELL'' 

ing, no matter how huge, has its foundation and 
corner-stone, and the foundation and corner-stone 
of an Allied victory is not your man in the trench, 
your picturesque flag-bearer, nor your gilded gen- 
eral. It is the unromantic, toil-stained, oil-bespat- 
tered laboring man back home. 

In Washington to-day they say that six and 
one half men are required to support each fight- 
ing man. This being the case, when you get your 
five million men over on the fighting-line, you will 
require some thirty-two and one half million men 
to support them. In other words, thirty-eight 
million men will be withdrawn from normal pur- 
suits. 

There are in your country, I believe, only forty- 
five million men between the ages of 18 and 45. 
With thirty-eight million of them devoting their 
energies to war-time industry, you will have but 
seven million to carry on the petty affairs of peace- 
ful times. In short, some eighty per cent, of your 
laboring men will be directing their energies 
trenchward, and it will require all their energies 
throughout every moment of the day. 

You have no idea, — you who have tasted of war 
so lightly, — of the tremendous demands of a mod- 
ern ** drive." Only a short time ago we British- 
ers, on a twenty-mile front during a four-day of- 
fensive, fired more than eleven million shells. 



WHO WILL WIN THE WAR 245 

Compare to-day's struggle in its hugeness with 
your own great battles of the Civil War. Your 
General Sherman, during his famous march from 
Atlanta to the sea, carried as his total supply of 
ammunition only as many rounds for each field- 
piece as a modern French ** seventy-five ' ' would 
fire away in some seven minutes. 

Perhaps you will glean from this some little 
inkling of the enormity of the front-line's appe- 
tite. And every one of these requirements come 
from the hands of the unromantic laboring man. 
He is the one who holds the balance of victory to- 
day. 

The side, irrespective of right or wrong, which 
can longest keep her laboring men working at 
their mightiest, will be the side to win. Germany 
to-day would be much farther back than she is, 
had there been a sufficient supply of shells at our 
command, and we will not blast her forces back- 
ward until our supply of shells and artillery is 
doubled, tripled, yes, quadrupled. 

All this spells only one thing — labor. It is the 
laboring man who must decide to-day whether or 
not he pleases in the future to serve as the tool 
of German autocracy or as the free servant of a 
free democracy. It is the laboring man, and he 
alone, who will put us in Berlin. Our air fleets, 
our ship-building programme, our everything, 



246 ^ ^LADIES FROM HELL" 

hang upon his beck and nod. Will he prove true 
to this mighty trust ! He can make his bed as he 
wills — to-day. 

And here I must risk your displeasure by criti- 
cism. But before I do so let me say that I know 
you will find the solution of the problem that now 
besets you. We had the same problem in Eng- 
land and throughout the British Empire at the 
beginning of the war. But we solved it ; Germany 
helped us with her **Zepps.'^ To-day you face 
the selfsame problem; to-day you are only ** mud- 
dling through. ' ' 

In England at this moment there is hardly a soul 
who is not keenly alive to the tremendous impor- 
tance of labor. You already know that over a 
million women are working in our munition-fac- 
tories, but do you know that these women are not 
** working women '^ in the ordinary sense of the 
word. They are women of the middle, yes, the 
higher classes. Some work eight hours a day; 
others leave their babies at kindergartens and 
work for three or four hours before returning to 
feed their children, and then return to work again. 
In the department-stores, in all walks of life, you 
find society-women working as waitresses, as 
clerks, and as stenographers. There is hardly a 
woman in Great Britain to-day who is shameless 
enough to say that she does not work for her liv- 



WHO WILL WIN THE WAR 247 

ing. I know of men high up in the commercial 
life of our land, men who before the war had un- 
numbered automobiles and whose houses are pa- 
latial mansions, who to-day take it as a matter of 
course that their wives and daughters should 
work either in their own offices or in the stores or 
shops of England. 

In short, every soul in England to-day is alive 
to the tremendous necessity for conserving labor 
and for making the utmost of every hour of the 
day. Every energy in England is devoted toward 
only one thing — ^the winning of the war. 

Those fur-clad women who go down at nine in 
the morning to serve as clerks in the department- 
stores of London do not do it for sweet charity's 
sake. They do not brag melodiously of the num- 
ber of sweaters they have knitted or the number 
of socks they have presented to our soldiers. All 
that is taken for granted ; it is only natural. They 
do not even brag of the fact that they work. It 
is only the natural and normal thing to do in 
England to-day. 

Contrast this with your country. I am a little 
amused at times to hear your women — and your 
men, too — teU of their mighty deeds of valor. 
Can you blame me? I come from a land where 
every nerve is strained to its utmost to win the 
war. I come to a land where the uttermost 



248 '* LADIES FROM HELL'' 

bounds of patriotism seem to be the purchase of 
Liberty Bonds or the knitting of socks. Wait 
until you get into it, my good friends, and then 
you will know why I smile a little sadly to myself 
as I compare England of to-day with your own 
United States. It is an unfair comparison, per- 
haps, and, anyway, you are not to be blamed. 
You are at war only diplomatically and to a cer- 
tain extent physically. You are not at war spir- 
itually, and for this you are in no way at fault. 

There are a number of reasons for your pres- 
ent state of coma. In the first place, you never 
really went to war. You just drifted warward. 
You just oozed into the war. You were told be- 
fore you declared war that you were *^ drifting 
into a world aflame.'' But so slowly did you 
progress from peace to war that the process occa- 
sioned you no discomfort or mental torture en 
route. 

Furthermore, the war is a long way off from 
you. Its horrors are as yet unreal. They are a 
thing apart from you, just as they were in Eng- 
land at first. Some day war will become a stern 
reality to you. It will burst in on you, and then 
the purchase of a Liberty Bond or the knitting 
of a sweater will cease to be the apex of your 
patriotism. 

There is still another reason why your people 



WHO WILL WIN THE WAR 249 

are not yet fully cognizant of this war. You 
lacked a psychological moment for its declaration. 
Every war which you have had to date has been 
declared when some incident has aroused your 
imagination and stung your fury. In 1898 you 
had your Maine, and behind your armies, surging 
southward, rose the battle-cry, ** Remember the 
Maine!'' In 1861 you had your Sumter and 
your Bull Run, and the mob was stung by the in- 
sult to their flag. Even your Revolutionary fore- 
fathers had their little ** Tea-Party'* down in Bos- 
ton. 

In short, if you will scan the horizon of demo- 
cratic wars, you will usually find some incident 
which has set off the bombshell of popular wrath 
and goaded your nation into action. 

But this war had no such psychological mo- 
ment, no such bombshell to fire the public pulse. 
When the Lusitania sank was the one large and 
thriving psychological moment. But for per- 
fectly legitimate reasons you postponed action at 
that time. Had you declared war then, I fully 
believe that one hundred million raving maniacs 
would have risen up, and only a little heat, ap- 
plied at intervals, would have kept you fighting 
hot while your swords were being forged from 
plowshares. 

But you did not declare war then, and in the in- 



250 ** LADIES FROM HELL" 

tervening time your righteous anger petered away 
and left you cold and calloused to the lesser shocks 
that ensued. Then, when you did declare war, 
you declared it long after the psychological mo- 
ment for its declaration had passed. You had 
lost interest in the thing, and, as a result, to this 
day you are at war only mentally and diplomat- 
ically. You are not at war spiritually. You are 
not willing to give and give and keep on giving. 
Your emotions still need to be aroused, for the 
emotions of a people are not negligible assets; 
they are not valueless. NO ! 

What was it stood off the Teuton hordes at 
Mons, at the Marne, and at Verdun? Was it the 
scanty stream of shells and shrapnel*? It was 
not. It was the emotions of the men in our 
trenches. It was the emotions of the men back 
home. It was the emotions of the women who 
gave the men. 

What America needs to-day is what England 
needed during the first months of the war — some- 
thing to fire the imagination, to arouse the popu- 
lar fury. What America needs above all else is 
some one who will snatch a brand from the fire 
across the sea and pass it on to the hands and 
hearts and homes of the American nation. Such 
a man will do more good than he who builds a 
hundred ships or makes a hundred thousand shells, 



WHO WILL WIN THE WAR 251 

for he will make America fighting mad, from boot- 
black to banker, and resolved to do her utmost, 
utterly regardless of the price. 

I criticize, though I realize full well that to- day- 
there are those who look upon the critic as close 
kin to the pro-German. Your country has been 
besieged with critics. You have had so many of 
them that they have deafened your ears to all 
criticism, be it constructive or destructive. This 
is not the right condition. Your great republic 
was built upon the rock of public criticism, and 
the man who silences criticism to-day is strangling 
the very thing that gave your nation birth. 

But no nation, least of all your own, in times 
such as these has room for the critic who brings 
no constructive suggestion with him. I hope to 
extricate myself from this class, not alone for 
selfish reasons, but because I hope to bring just 
a wee message to America, a message culled from 
my knowledge of England and the Allied fighting- 
line. 

To-day I think you will agree with me when I 
repeat that few of you are at war in aught but a 
diplomatic and physical sense. You are not at 
war emotionally. In your saner moments you 
frankly admit it, and you are inclined to smile 
with me at your conceit. You have not as yet be- 
gun to pool your selfish interests for the common 



252 ** LADIES FROM HELL'' 

good. Your workmen, even those eng'aged di- 
rectly in war-time industries, feel free to strike. 
Your silk-stockinged aristocracy — some of them — 
do not blush at profiteering. You let your irre- 
sponsible rabble tie up the production of timber 
for aeroplanes and ships. Negligence or inexpe- 
rience ties up the production of war materials. 
There is no crime in that, perhaps. The crime 
rests on you, on you who calmly sit and knit and 
give from your surplus to liberty loans, on you 
who do nothing and then like to say that you are 
** suffering all the privations of war.'' 

But you are not. You know you are not. The 
war has not stretched its ghastly finger into your 
homes. You are not really at war. What you 
need is some awful shock to arouse you from your 
justifiable lethargy. What you need is a bomb- 
shell dropped blazing into your land. What you 
need is a salesman to sell this war to you. 

Wars have to be sold to a free and democratic 
country. Usually they are automatically sold on 
the declaration, as was your Spanish-American 
War, your Civil War, and your Revolution. But 
this war, let me repeat, owing to the circumstances 
surrounding its declaration, had no such bomb- 
shell connected with your declaration, and the re- 
sult is that some one must go at the job of selling 
this war to the hearts of the American people in 



WHO WILL WIN THE WAE 253 

the same thorough manner in which you have gone 
at the job of selling the war to the heads of the 
American people. 

America is not **sold'' to-day. The educated 
minority are * ' sold ' ' to a certain extent. But how 
about the man in the street, the laboring man, the 
vast bulk of your population, the man upon whom 
the fate of this war and the fate of America now 
hangs? Go out and talk with the man in the 
streets, and then form your opinion as to whether 
or not America is willing to give her all. 

It will take an appeal to your emotions to con- 
summate the sale of this war. Emotions are the 
factors which bring about every sale, be it for 
house-paint, automobiles, or wars. Wars are 
fought by men, machines, and money, but wars 
are won by the emotions which actuate those men, 
by the emotions which actuate those machines and 

that money. 

My hope and prayer to-day is that America will 
not have to wait until the clouds of war hang low 
over her streets. I pray that she will not have to 
wait until her avenues stream with maimed and 
crippled men. Before that time comes I hope that 
some master salesman, some human engineer, will 
rise up and touch the spark that will set your emo- 
tional fires to burning. Before that time comes 
I hope that America will awaken to the very utter- 



254 '* LADIES FROM HELL" 

most fiber of her soul, and will steel herself with 
the wrath of a nation aroused to a fighting pitch. 

For when your boys go over the top they '11 
want to know that they have behind them not just 
the cold, insensate money of the American people ; 
they '11 want to know that they have behind them 
the heart and soul of the American people. 
They '11 want to know that the American people 
are going, over the top with them, and that they 
are fighting mad and resolved to do their utmost, 
regardless of the cost. 

We — all of us — ^want America to be an ally with 
strong, hot pulses, and not just the pulsing of 
shallow, shoddy sympathies, because when the 
history of this war is written we want America's 
finger to reach down into every line. We want 
your impress on the book of German fate. 

If you are to be an ally, we want you to be an 
ally fired with the emotions which fire Great Brit- 
ain, the emotions which fire poor, shattered 
France. We want you to be an ally at war not 
with your men, not with your money, not with 
your machines. NO ! We want you to be an ally 
at war with your emotions, at war with your 
hearts, at war with your inmost and uttermost 
souls! 

THE END 





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